Lockton Shares 10 Tips for Improving Healthcare Employee Safety & Morale [Professional Safety]

Healthcare organizations can be particularly vulnerable to employee injuries because of the physical demands of caring for patients. In an effort to reduce those injuries and associated costs, risk management specialists at Lockton, a privately held insurance brokerage firm, recommend that healthcare organizations broaden their patient safety programs to include employee safety. In a new report titled "Ten Steps to Enhance Healthcare Employees' Safety," Lockton's loss control consultant Lori Severson suggests ways for organizations to add employee safety initiatives to organizational metrics.

1) Engage a corporate risk/safety management oversight committee. This multidisciplined team of clinicians, risk management safety professionals and operations team members will develop policies and procedures to guide the organization's employee safety initiative. Final policies and procedures will be reviewed and endorsed by the executive committee/policy process.

2) Compile safety and health contact information. Document who leads safety/risk management and how that person(s) should be contacted. Include each person's responsibilities, scope and services.

3) Disseminate safety alerts. When root-cause analyses identify a systemic cause of a safety concern, alert regional offices of this cause and the appropriate employee safety prevention steps to be taken.

4) Share daily safety advisories with team members. Begin and end each employee's day with short, positive safety thoughts to advise on the importance of safety all day long.

5) Build automated accident and injury management systems. A saying in management goes, "What gets measured, gets done." Use this as incentive to determine what employee safety metrics should be measured, evaluated and refined.

This system should mirror the system in place for reviewing patient incident reporting and analysis. Use of an automated system that provides a dashboard can show, at a glance, whether employee safety metrics are within range or are unacceptable. All operations managers must be involved in monitoring these metrics with their front-line and regional staff to address trends and loss costs.

6) Conduct safety operations assessment reviews. To drive the safety program, conduct annual and unannounced safety systems audits. Designated staff members should review safety program implementation effectiveness and communicate results to senior leadership. These findings will drive corrective action discussions at the system and regional levels.

7) Create an operations and safety playbook and place it on the company intranet. It should contain monthly safety themes/topics and actions that an organization should take. It also should include various training, documentation and selfauditing tools to ensure that these operations practices are genuine and dynamic.

8) Provide additional training for managers via a manager's safety/risk management program guide. Create this guide to deliver additional higher level training to managers. The emphasis must be on understanding why employee safety and communication are important and beneficial to the organization. Managers must learn practices for effectively managing employees' expectations and the safety processes.

9) Appoint peer mentors/leaders for employee safety. Encourage or require risk management team members to collaborate with clinical staff to serve in this capacity. Their objective is to perform risk assessments and to develop care plans that include employee and patient safety systems. These equal systems will be communicated prior to the contract agreement to ensure that all parties agree to the necessary safety measures. If safety measures cannot be agreed upon by both parties, services will be terminated or not rendered.

10) Form a safety committee to review incidents, ensure that root causes have been found and corrective actions taken. The committee must include front-line members as well as members of their management team. Meetings must be on paid time and foster a culture of prevention.

"If your organization can make a serious commitment to implementing these 10 steps, you will see a significant improvement in employee safety, patient safety and even employee morale," says Severson, who was named ASSE's Healthcare Practice Specialty Safety Professional of the Year in 2011. For more information, visit www.lockton.com.