Putting on the blitz’ raises safety awareness
Campaign includes catchy posters, measurement
"Splash happens." That stark fact and other compelling messages on safety posters helped Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, CA, reduce splash and needlestick exposures by 70%. A focused awareness campaign can lead to safer work practices, says Linda Good, RN, MN, COHN-S, employee occupational health coordinator, who spoke at the recent annual conference of the Association of Occupational Health Profes-sionals in Healthcare in Albuquerque, NM.
The October conference attracted about 225 employee health professionals who heard updates on Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) activities and the latest trends in disability management, accident investigation, and bloodborne pathogen protection. This year, the conference highlighted "Best Practices," which gave Good an opportunity to share the "blitz strategy" she used in the exposure-prevention campaign. The campaign was recognized by her health system with a "Values in Action: Quality" award.
"Each week we had a different series of posters put up at all six facilities simultaneously," says Good. "No matter where you went for a meeting, everywhere you’d look you’d see these posters. The idea was that the repetition in itself would be an eye-catching element."
That just wasn’t a matter of creating some posters and slapping them on the walls. Good and her colleagues took a methodical approach both to the message and the outcomes.
They began by reviewing employee injury logs to look for problem areas. "We were trying to pick up on things in which we could intervene," she says.
The Employee Health Consortium, made up of employee health professionals who work in the Scripps hospitals, home health agency, and skilled nursing facility, decided on four basic topics related to bloodborne exposures: sharps container injuries, splashes to mucous membranes, hidden sharps on instrument trays, and a gen-eral resistance to change [to accommodate safer devices and practices].
From the outset, the committee members agreed to collect before-and-after data on exposures. "One of our high priorities was to make this measurable," says Good.
In fact, conducting a campaign and measuring its effects is one way to show the impact of an employee health department, says Good.
"We need to demonstrate our value to the administrators and decision makers, so they aren’t tempted to do away with us [in a cost-cutting crunch]," she says. "We felt that it would be much more impressive to say at our facility we had a 25% decrease in needlesticks following the campaign, rather than saying we felt this was successful."
As a baseline, Good used exposure data from the quarter preceding the campaign. As a follow-up, she looked at exposures the quarter after the campaign.
Good drew the messages for the campaign from interviews with employees who had exposure incidents. "We chose things we thought would impact them. We tried to pick things that were vitally important to them."
For example, one poster uses speech bubbles to reveal why nurses don’t use the needleless system: "It’s a hassle. I’m in a hurry. I’m only injecting the IV line."
Then the poster states: "You haven’t seen hassle ’til you spend a year getting HIV tested. Think safety — Use the needless system every time."
"Maybe if we poked fun at it a little bit or repeated back to the people some of the excuses they were giving to us, they could [question] if they really were legitimate excuses," Good says. Overall, the four-week campaign led to a reduction in needlesticks at all three participating hospitals.
Many of the posters remained up at the facilities, although over time, they lose their impact, notes Good. She says she’s ready for another awareness campaign. This one is about the importance of looking out for the welfare of co-workers. She calls it, "Be a Safety Angel."
"My pet dislike is [to do] accident follow-up," she says. "There’s nothing more sad than to follow up on injuries after they’ve happened. Anything I can prevent from happening is great; that’s my highest priority."
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