Articles Tagged with ''healthcare worker safety''

OSHA has updated instructions for conducting inspections and issuing citations related to worker exposures to tuberculosis in healthcare settings. This instruction incorporates guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report, "Guidelines for Preventing the Transmission of Mycobacterium Tuberculosis in Health-Care Settings, 2005*."

Targeting some of the most common causes of workplace injury and illness in the healthcare industry, OSHA announced that it is expanding its use of enforcement resources in hospitals and nursing homes to focus on: musculoskeletal disorders related to patient or resident handling; bloodborne pathogens; workplace violence; tuberculosis and slips, trips and falls.

California is the only state with a law governing minimum nurse-to-patient staffing ratios. The ratios vary depending on the type of hospital service but are in the range of one nurse for every five patients. (The ratios are available on the California Department of Public Health website.) The law went into effect in 2004.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in partnership with the Sierra Leone College of Medicine and Allied Health Sciences (COMAHS) and the Sierra Leone Ministry of Health and Sanitation (MoHS), is now enrolling and vaccinating volunteers for the Sierra Leone Trial to Introduce a Vaccine against Ebola (STRIVE).

When most people think about going into work every day, they probably assume a few things. One of those things is that they won’t be physically assaulted while doing their job. That they will go home at the end of the day without being injured or killed.

In 2013, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported over 23,000 significant injuries due to assaults in the workplace. More than 70 percent were in the healthcare and social service settings. Healthcare and social service workers are almost four times as likely to be injured as a result of violence than the average private sector worker.

The current Ebola epidemic in West Africa is the largest in history and is unprecedented in many ways, including the large number of healthcare workers who have been infected while treating patients. The large scale of the epidemic, as well as the two healthcare workers who contracted Ebola while caring for the first case in the United States, has directed particular attention to the personal protective equipment (PPE) used by healthcare workers to reduce their risk of infection.

New York Presbyterian-Columbia University Medical Center in Northern Manhattan last year replaced linen laundry bags with thin plastic bags that broke and needlessly exposed workers to laundry contaminated with blood, bodily fluids and other infectious materials.

National Nurses United (NNU) is calling on OSHA and other states to follow the mandatory safeguards recently established by California to protect nurses, other health workers, and the public from the threat of the deadly Ebola virus.

“I had a reporter call me,” said an attendee at this week’s American Industrial Hygiene Association (AIHA) annual Fall Conference, held in Arlington, VA. “He said he had spent three hours at the Congressional Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) hearing last week, where CDC Director Tom Frieden was grilled, and not once was OSHA or NIOSH mentioned, according to this reporter. He wanted to know why.”