-
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.
-
These voluntary guidelines, issued in 1989, say that an effective program should include:
-
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?
-
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:
-
Identify hazards. Take steps to address them. Train employees in safety measures. Evaluate your program and make improvements.
-
Everyone wants to have high rates of health care worker influenza immunization, but just who gets counted in their numbers?
-
As this issue went to press, more stringent standards for influenza immunization of hospital workers were under consideration by the Joint Commission.
-
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.
-
The carrot and the stick have worked in Washington state to reduce the number and severity of safe patient handling injuries.
-
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.