Hospital Employee Health – May 1, 2011
May 1, 2011
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Hospitals face major barriers in tracking worker influenza shots
Everyone wants to have high rates of health care worker influenza immunization, but just who gets counted in their numbers? -
Measuring influenza vaccination of HCWs
The National Quality Forum has a time-limited (pilot) measurement of influenza vaccination coverage of healthcare personnel. -
Hospital committed to mandatory policy
At Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, every health care worker, contractor, vendor, and volunteer needs to be tracked for the hospital's strict mandatory influenza vaccination policy. -
Will OSHA follow CA model on new rule?
Identify hazards. Take steps to address them. Train employees in safety measures. Evaluate your program and make improvements. -
Cal injury, illness prevention rule
The California regulation, which became effective in 1991, includes the following provisions: -
AIHA standard calls for ongoing improvement
A voluntary standard (ANSI Z10-2005) was developed by the American Industrial Hygiene Association and approved by the American National Standards Institute in 2005, and includes the following elements: -
Take the 'pulse' of your safety culture
The first step toward building a safety culture may be taking the "pulse" of the one you've already got. Do your employees believe that managers care about employee safety? Do they feel comfortable alerting managers to hazards? Do they use personal protective equipment when it's recommended? -
OSHA Safety and Health Management Guidelines
These voluntary guidelines, issued in 1989, say that an effective program should include: -
ACIP: Vaccinate all HCWs against pertussis
Hospitals should provide pertussis vaccines to their health care workers free of charge, but should still treat employees with antibiotics if they have unprotected exposure to patients with pertussis and work with patients at high risk, such as young infants, a federal vaccine advisory panel says. -
Back injury claimsdrop with no-lift law
The carrot and the stick have worked in Washington state to reduce the number and severity of safe patient handling injuries. -
When fever's gone, HCWs still shed virus
Even when health care workers return to work after being ill with influenza, they still may be shedding viable virus. That is a finding from an analysis of a small outbreak of pandemic H1N1 in the fall of 2009. -
Better container design reduces sharps injuries
About one in 10 sharps injuries occur during or after disposal of devices. Those exposures can be prevented with improvements in sharps containers and disposal methods, safety experts say. -
Reality Check: Joint Commission drops 90% hand hygiene compliance expectation
The Joint Commission has amended an infection control standard that called for hand hygiene compliance of more than 90%, conceding that the expectation was too high after a group of eight leading hospitals could muster only an 82% rate in a performance improvement project. -
Hospitals picked hand hygiene as top patient safety challenge
Hand hygiene was chosen as "the number one patient safety challenge" by eight leading hospitals for the first Robust Process Improvement (RPI) project by the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare. -
Top 10 reasons HCWs fail to wash hands
In a hand hygiene improvement project by the Joint Commission's Center for Transforming Healthcare, the following common barriers to compliance were observed across the eight participating hospitals. -
A tool to target the solution: From getting started to holding the gain
In a hand hygiene improvement project by the Joint Commission's Center for Transforming Healthcare, participating hospitals used a Targeted Solutions Tool (TST). Available to all accredited organizations, the Joint Commission TST model provides the user with the data collection tool, data entry programming, self-supported observer training module and real-time reporting of compliance rates complete with charts that can be downloaded and printed for display. -
Joint Commission pushing for flu shot improvement
As this issue went to press, more stringent standards for influenza immunization of hospital workers were under consideration by the Joint Commission. -
Joint Commission ready to partner up
The Joint Commission has pledged its full support for the recently formed Partnership for Patients, a public-private effort to make hospital care safer by reducing health care associated infections and other preventable adverse events.