It’s an all too common tale among nurses.
A patient is weak and falls while trying to stand up, and in trying to help lift the patient up, the nurse feels something pop or twinge. She’s left seriously injured, immobile, or unable to work.1
Nursing has one of the highest rates of injury and illness of any industry.2 This may seem surprising but if you take a moment to think about all of the hazards a nurse can encounter each day, the dangers add up. Getting stuck by a needle, tripping on a cord connected to a monitor, pulling a muscle (or worse) from lifting heavy equipment or moving a patient, and many healthcare workers are even being physically assaulted by a hostile or disoriented patient.
Studies show that 60 percent of a hospital’s direct patient care staff, like nurses, live with pain and discomfort related to workplace injuries. And beyond that, approximately 12% of nurses leave the profession every year because of pain and injuries. The costs associated with these injuries can also be significant for the employee as well as the healthcare center.3
When we’re hurt or sick we turn to doctors and nurses to help U.S. feel better. But who makes sure that the doctors and nurses are safe?
Putting Safety First
Keeping staff safe and injury free is a must for any hospital or medical center. While implementing or improving a comprehensive injury prevention program may seem like a daunting task, hospitals can turn to organizations like BSI to make the process a smooth one. Using its RAPID Program, BSI works with hospitals to assess their current safety programs and implement improvements that can have near-immediate results. Designed using compiled best practices, the RAPID Program is completed in four steps.
Assess
The first step is to understand the strengths and weaknesses in each of a hospital’s staff injury prevention programs, comparing them with best practices. This phase includes a series of assessments done by both program stakeholders and BSI, which eventually result in a final report and implementation plan.
Strategize
Following the assessment phase, BSI conducts a one-day organizational strategy session with key program stakeholders to review the recommendations and develop a detailed implementation plan, which outlines phases, goals, resource needs, potential barriers, and major action items. The plan is the central resource to direct the organization’s injury prevention program going forward.
Implement
BSI understands the significant commitment a medical center must make to implement or improve an injury prevention program. To help, BSI can provide additional support through an embedded hospital injury prevention resource or a program-specific subject matter expert that will enable the organization to most successfully execute against its strategic plan.
Sustain
After investing in improving an injury prevention programs, it is imperative that hospitals sustain results and continually improve upon successes. In this phase, BSI can help to keep programs headed in the right direction over the long term by providing the tools, resources, and expert support needed for success.
RAPID Results
A leading U.S. medical center was experiencing employee injury rates well above the national average, while also embarking upon an expansion that would double its size within the next five years. With an increased number of staff, implementing standards to prevent injury became a top priority.
The medical center engaged BSI to conduct a gap assessment of the organization’s overall injury prevention program and identify and prioritize opportunities for improvement. Working with the medical center’s team, BSI developed a five-year strategic plan aimed at reducing or eliminating key hazards in five identified high-risk departments.
The investment the medical center made in implementing and sustaining its safety program began paying off quickly. Within the first year, the organization saved $4.5 million in workers’ compensation costs. And more importantly, the number of lost working days was reduced by 86%.4
Implementing processes and standards to keep healthcare staff safe on the job not only benefits a healthcare center’s bottom line, it also contributes to better patient care by ensuring adequate staffing. Current trends in patient care push providers to look at the whole patient when determining care, BSI’s RAPID Program helps healthcare centers approach staff safety from a “whole hospital” perspective to improve worker health and safety.
Rachel Michael M.S., CPE, CHSP is Director of Healthcare EHS Services at BSI, a leading provider of business improvement solutions.
1 https://www.npr.org/2015/02/04/382639199/hospitals-fail-to-protect-nursing-staff-from-becoming-patients
2 http://fortune.com/2016/10/27/5-industries-hurt-job/
3 https://www.bsigroup.com/en-US/programs/hospital-staff-injury-prevention/top-hospital-staff-injuries/
4 https://www.bsigroup.com/LocalFiles/en-US/Case-Studies/rapid/bsi-case-study-hospital-injury-prevention.pdf?_ga=2.136090808.867589648.1535117376-2050943607.1533563205