America’s Association of Public Health Laboratories has awarded the New York State Food Safety and Metrology Laboratory the prestigious title of being the “Nation’s Healthiest Lab Award”. The award is given to a company who excels in environmental stewardship and health promotion in both practice and policy. It also recognises the laboratory that demonstrates outstanding efforts to reduce its collective environmental impact and ensure a healthy workplace.
In order to a be a recipient of this amazing award, the laboratory must fulfil all the requirements in a self-assessment check-list, which was developed as an evaluation tool to identify environmental responsibility and healthy workplace practices within member laboratories. The main areas that were focused on in the checklist is health promotion, environmental sustainability and policy implementation.
The Association of Public Health Laboratories hopes that this award would encourage and promote better initiatives for laboratories and their employees. They wish that it will foster healthy personal choices for employees, members and guests; environmental sustainability; initiatives related to promoting a prevention-focused perspective on health; and a role in engaging the broader laboratory community.
The laboratory in Alabany is operated by the Department of Agriculture and Market. Its role is to protect New Yorkers from food borne pathogens by analysing over 20,000 food and beverage samples for biological and chemical hazards, standards of identity, and compliance with state and federal regulations. The facility also safely stores and maintains the State’s primary standards of mass, length, temperature and volume, which in turn are used to test commercial weighing and measuring devices such as scales in grocery stores, pumps at gas stations, meters on fuel oil or propane delivery vehicles, and meters in taxicabs.
For more information regarding the laboratory and its award, click here.