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Screening for latent tuberculosis, once a key function of hospital employee health, has been transformed by new guidelines and new blood tests. The changes have greatly reduced the use of skin testing and freed employee health professionals to perform other important tasks, but they also have created some new, sometimes difficult, issues.
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Hospitals should identify which employees could be exposed to hazardous drugs and should track their medical history in a surveillance program, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) said in a recent notice.
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The toughest flu vaccine mandate in the country faces a legal challenge from the nation's largest union representing health care workers.
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The day after the horrific Dec. 14, 2012 shootings at an elementary school in Newtown, CT, a visitor who was reportedly upset over the cardiac care his wife received shot two employees and a police officer at St. Vincent's Hospital in Birmingham, AL before he was killed by another officer on the scene.
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Nurses often don't know when or how to use respirators, and the fault may lie with their education or the lack of it.
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When you get on an airplane, you expect layers of precautions to prevent any error that could lead to failure and injury. You demand the same or even greater care from the nearby nuclear power plant. And now, you can expect that serious attention to safety from a growing number of hospitals.
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In a move that raises the profile of employee health, The Joint Commission accrediting agency is expanding its definition of a "sentinel event" to include serious injury to health care workers.
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There's more work to do to keep health care workers safe from needlesticks. That was the primary message of an online awareness event by Safe in Common, an organization promoting sharps safety.
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Protecting the contents of a root cause analysis (RCA) requires much more than slapping a peer review label on the file and assuming that label means it is off limits to prying eyes. Peer review privilege might not protect your RCA at all, but there are other ways to limit the potential downside from someone reading about all your shortcomings.
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The importance of encryption is emphasized with most of the recent major breaches added to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) list of breaches. Seven of the breaches involved laptops, while the other two involved paper records.
