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Doug Allan

Stubbornly high rates of health care worker injury - Healthy Debate - 0 views

healthydebate.ca/...health-care-worker-injury

H&S

shared by Doug Allan on 03 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • In Ontario, the hazards of health care work were dramatically highlighted during the SARS crisis. Overall, 375 people contracted SARS in the spring of 2003. Over  three quarters were  infected in a health care setting, of whom 45% were health care workers.
  • Justice Archie Campbell led a commission to learn from SARS, and highlighted the danger for staff working in health care settings – and in this case, hospitals. The report opens by stating “hospitals are dangerous workplaces, like mines and factories, yet they lack the basic safety culture and workplace safety systems that have become expected and accepted for many years in Ontario mines and factories.”
  • Workplace injuries have been steadily declining over the past two decades.  In 1987, 48.9 of 1,000 working Canadians received some form of workers’ compensation for injury on the job, and this has declined continuously to 14.7 per 1,000 in 2010. While injury rates for health care workers have declined slightly over that same time period, they remain stubbornly difficult to change.
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  • One challenge in understanding the extent to which people in health care are injured at work is that injuries tend to be underreported. Generally the data used to measure health care worker injury is through workers’ compensation claims. A study of Canadian health care workers found that of 2,500 health care workers who experienced an injury, less than half filed a workers’ compensation claim.
  • Recent data from Alberta shows that about 3% of health care workers are at risk of a disabling injury in 2012, compared with 1.45% of workers in the mining and petroleum industry.
  • A study of health care worker injuries in three British Columbia health regions from 2004 to 2005 found that injury rates are particularly high for those providing direct patient care – and highest among nursing or care aides (known as health care aides in Alberta, and personal support workers in Ontario).
  • 83% of health care worker injuries were musculoskeletal in nature.
  • However, there have been efforts to mechanize some of the dangerous aspects of health care. Musculoskeletal injuries are the leading category of occupational injury for health care workers.
  • Evidence suggests that this is the case – a 2009 British study of over 40,000 workplace injury claims found that 89% were made by women, and 11% by men.
  • Gert Erasmus, senior provincial director of workplace health and safety for Alberta Health Services says that “health care is a people intensive business – combine that with physically demanding jobs and an aging workforce.”
  • The Canadian Federation of Nurses’ Unions notes nurses retire around the age of 56 – compared to the average Canadian worker at 62.
  • Experts also point to the changing work environments for many health care workers. There is a worldwide trend towards moving health care services out of hospitals into patients’ homes. Thease are uncharted waters for workplace safety and prevention of injury. Little is known about how often workers in peoples’ homes are injured and the kinds of injuries they are sustaining.
  • Gert Erasmus notes the tremendous insecurity of providing health care inside patients’ homes. “They [health care workers in homes] work in an environment that is not controlled at all, which is fundamentally different than most industries and workplaces.” In this environment, workers are more likely to be alone, lacking back up from colleagues, and the help of aids such as mechanical lifts.
  • Miranda Ferrier, President of the Ontario Personal Support Worker Association says that each time a personal support worker enters a new patient’s home – they enter into the unknown. “You are lucky if you know anything about a client when you go into the home” she says.
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