A culture of safety includes patients
Safety reduces inter-related risks
When you work to fix one problem in workplace safety, you may end up reducing other hazards to both workers and patients. Safe patient handling offers an example of this broad impact of injury prevention. While reducing musculoskeletal injuries, it also may reduce the risk of patient-on-health care worker violence as well as the risk of patient falls.
Look at it from the standpoint of both the patient and employee, says Charlotte Lynch, MS, CNS, RN, safe patient handling coordinator at the Dayton (OH) VA Medical Center. The nurse or aide may be fatigued and in pain from manual patient handling. The patient may be in pain, disoriented, confused or uncomfortable when someone comes to grasp them for a transfer.
“It’s almost like nurturing them when you move them with various kinds of slings,” she says. “They feel more secure and the pain is less. The staff can stand to the side, and they don’t have to envelope them in their arms.”
There are some important issues to keep in mind so you can leverage the benefits of your injury prevention program, workplace safety experts say:
A culture of safety matters. A study of 198 nurses found a correlation between how they viewed the workplace climate and the level of workplace violence and aggression. If nurse managers and hospital policies reflected a concern about violence, there were fewer incidents.1 “It’s important to determine what the culture is within a unit,” notes Mary Matz, MSPH, CPE, CSPHP, national program manager of Patient Care Ergonomics Office for the VA’s Public Health Occupational Health Strategic Healthcare Group.
The Dayton VA recommends two caregivers help with patient transfers, if possible, even when using lift equipment. The VA also has a violence prevention program that includes training of staff and flagging the records of patients with a history of violence.
“You can’t eliminate the risk, but you possibly can have the risk dealt with more efficiently and effectively,” says Lynch.
Take a comprehensive look at injuries. Too often, injury prevention focuses on an analysis of one incident without looking at the broader scope, says Jane Lipscomb, PhD, RN, FAAN, director of the Work and Health Research Center at the University of Maryland School of Nursing in Baltimore.
An injury and illness prevention program encourages employee health professionals to look for trends in injury reports. They also may see connections between different types of incidents. “We need to have a comprehensive program that looks across hazards,” she says.
Use ‘safety huddles’ to gain and share information. Lifts alone can’t solve a safety problem. To address patient handling concerns, the VA encourages units to have a “safety huddle,” a short staff meeting focused on a safety message or addressing an incident. They consider “what happened, what needed to happen and what we can make happen next time,” says Lynch. These huddles also could be used to discuss verbal or physical assault, address risk factors and raise awareness of violence prevention techniques, she says.
Reference
- Spector PE, Coulter ML, Stockwell HG, et al. A Perceived violence climate: A new construct and its relationship to workplace physical violence and verbal aggression, and their potential consequences. Work & Stress 2007; 21:117-130.
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