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Employers strongly view occupational health professionals as crucial to employee retention and a healthy financial bottom line, according to results of a study commissioned by the American Association of Occupational Health Nurses.
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The advent of personal digital assistants (PDAs) has been a boon to many in the business and medical worlds, but with the blessings has come a curse for some — a painful, chronic hand injury known as “PDA thumb” or “BlackBerry thumb.
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Gaps in the system are costing you money: the injury that isn’t reported right away; the employee who doesn’t keep a doctor’s appointment; and the supervisor who doesn’t make an effort to find a position for an employee with temporary restrictions.
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Return to work can be challenging for any recovering or rehabilitating worker, but helping a new mother adjust to being back at work can require an occupational health nurse to be especially creative and understanding.
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Data on many work-related illnesses and injuries are being missed because health care providers are failing to get good occupational histories, according to a director at NIOSH.
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Mayo Clinic ophthalmologists have found commercially available Class 3A green laser pointers, commonly used in the construction industry and by architects to point out details of structures in daylight, can cause visible harm to the eye’s retina with exposures as short as 60 seconds.
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The use of opioids for pain relief is limited by what some have called opiophobia, or the fear that patients will become addicted to the drugs. The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) has spelled out a means of addressing the drawbacks to opioid therapy and reducing the fear of prescribing opioids.
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The National Institutes of Health (NIH) found its sweeping new ethics changes were proving a hard pill for its employees to swallow. As a result, they supplemented it with proposals that respond to actual and threatened resignations by some of the key NIH employees who say the new regulation, which requires employees to divest themselves of outside consulting and investments with pharmaceutical and biotech industries, is too restrictive.
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Illinois has become the first state to enact legislation based on the idea that an apology might serve as the most effective means to stop some medical malpractice lawsuits.
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A convicted murderer who sought a reprieve so he could donate his liver to his ill sister was executed in May after Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniel was advised by doctors that Gregory Scott Johnson was not a good candidate to be a donor, and that his sister, Debra Otis, would likely receive a donor organ through regular channels within a matter of months. Johnsons bid to become an organ donor resurrected debate about the ethics of accepting organs from condemned inmates.
