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Everyone wants to have high rates of health care worker influenza immunization, but just who gets counted in their numbers?
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Identify hazards. Take steps to address them. Train employees in safety measures. Evaluate your program and make improvements.
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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:
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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?
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These voluntary guidelines, issued in 1989, say that an effective program should include:
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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.
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The Joint Commission has amended an infection control standard that called for hand hygiene compliance of more than 90%, conceding that the expectation was too high after a group of eight leading hospitals could muster only an 82% rate in a performance improvement project.
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Hand hygiene was chosen as "the number one patient safety challenge" by eight leading hospitals for the first Robust Process Improvement (RPI) project by the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare.
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In a hand hygiene improvement project by the Joint Commission's Center for Transforming Healthcare, the following common barriers to compliance were observed across the eight participating hospitals.
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In a hand hygiene improvement project by the Joint Commission's Center for Transforming Healthcare, participating hospitals used a Targeted Solutions Tool (TST). Available to all accredited organizations, the Joint Commission TST model provides the user with the data collection tool, data entry programming, self-supported observer training module and real-time reporting of compliance rates complete with charts that can be downloaded and printed for display.
