The Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has released a new educational web resource at http://www.osha.gov/hospitals with extensive materials to help hospitals prevent worker injuries, assess workplace safety needs, enhance safe patient handling programs, and implement safety and health management systems.
OSHA has found that the most serious hazards in hospitals can include lifting transferring and repositioning patients, but violence, needle sticks, and a number of other issues are also of concern. Manual lifting can injure caregivers but it also puts patients at risk for falls, fractures, bruises, and skin tears. Caregiver fatigue injury, and stress are tied to a higher risk of medication errors, and patient infections.
To meet safety needs, OSHA has produced the “Safety and Health Management System: A Road Map for Hospitals”. According to the Roadmap, almost all successful injury and prevention programs, require management leadership, employee participation, hazard identification and assessment, hazard prevention and control, education and training, plus system evaluations.
To show leadership, CEO Dan Friedrich at the Blake Medical Center in Bradenton Florida encourages employees to email him with questions, concerns, and suggestions on safety and can remain anonymous if they wish. Friedrich receives more than 500 questions each month. He then consults his management team, responds to questions personally, and shares his answers with the entire staff.
He also includes safety messaging in his weekly communications to the staff. The hospital COO notifies the staff each year as to how much money the hospital saved by keeping injury costs low. When the hospital is able to purchase new equipment as a result of these savings, he credits the staff for their dedication to keeping the workplace safe.