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Barcoded wristbands can greatly reduce the opportunity for patient identification errors, says David Grant, RPh, MBA, vice president of pharmacy and clinical process improvement at Summit Health in Chambersburg, PA.
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Patient identification errors continue to plague the healthcare industry despite years of efforts to eradicate this potentially disastrous problem. Understanding why patients and specimens are misidentified is key to reducing or eliminating errors, and risk managers can make progress by focusing on the human behavioral components of healthcare work.
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Safe lift programs save money, and they save more if they are comprehensive and have leadership support. That finding from a new study of workers' compensation and lift-related injuries in long-term care provides a strong, new underpinning for the financial benefits of safe patient handling.
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As with most employers, the cost of health insurance was rising year after year for Sentara Healthcare of Norfolk, VA, an integrated health care delivery system that includes eight acute care hospitals, outpatient centers, long-term care, and Optima Health Plan, an insurance subsidiary.
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Outpatient centers have historically attracted little attention from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, although needle market data shows they have lagged in sharps safety. But that hands-off approach is ending with a regional emphasis program in four states.
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It's time for hospitals to stand up for the health and wellness of their own.
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If your workplace is downsizing, don't be surprised if this causes some tension between occupational health and safety.
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Keeping employees from gaining weight is a major challenge in any workplace, but a new study shows that in fact, very simple workplace design changes can help stave off weight gain.1 However, these interventions by themselves aren't likely to lead to weight loss.
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Direct costs of workplace injuries are fairly straightforward, but indirect costs are often ten times that amount. If occupational health doesn't consider indirect costs, which may be difficult to compute, prevention programs may appear not worth the expense.
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The question "What can kill a worker?" will give you a different kind of answer than asking "What can hurt a worker?" says Gregg Clark, director of global occupational safety and hygiene for Dallas-based Kimberly-Clark Corporation, where a strategy of focusing on fatality elimination is currently being implemented.
