On Tuesday September 14, 2011, Dr. Scott Harris will present ”OSHA in Healthcare: Out of Sight & Out of Mind?” at the 2011 PureSafety Conference in Nashville, TN. He is one of a handful of industry speakers invited to participate in the event. Our web visitors can download sneak preview slides of Scott’s presentation here. A technical paper on this presentation is scheduled for publication in OSHATracker in September. Sorry, no release until then, but we will post it here as soon as it’s out.
So what is all the fuss about? Based on a number of generally accepted myths about OSHA, members of the healthcare community may think that management would be justified in taking little or no additional action to prevent the spread of occupationally acquired infectious diseases or deal with other OSHA issues. The facts say otherwise.
OSHA claims nosocomials to be “among the leading causes of death in the United States, accounting for an estimated 1.7 million infections and 99,000 associated deaths in 2002.” If accurate, healthcare-associated infections — these things you catch while there for something else — kill more people in the U.S. every year than AIDS, drug overdoses, food-borne illness, murder, highway, rail and plane crashes, lightning, tornadoes, West Nile Virus and workplace fatalities COMBINED. OSHA is using strong language with clear intent to take action and in their 2010 Request for Information (RFI) characterizes healthcare as having “a weak culture of safety.” Eleven million employees across thousands of sites, incident rates far higher than general industry norms, low inspection rates, complaints driving half of hospital inspections and millions of infections and 99,000 fatalities per year make healthcare an attractive target. An industry view of TJC accreditation as the program that matters combined with the relative lack of healthcare inspections by OSHA has marginalized occupational health and safety programs within healthcare and nurtured the myths discussed in this presentation.
The setting begs for regulatory intervention, which OSHA asserts in the RFI was very successful in similar circumstances for bloodborne pathogens and TB. There are no healthcare exemptions to the OSHA requirements, and years of operating under the honor system haven’t worked. Healthcare must put the same emphasis on OSHA programs as they currently give The Joint Commission. This presentation explores OSHA coverage for Healthcare workers, the 2010 RFI, historical inspection rates and results and why OSHA sees healthcare as a high-hazard general industry sector, but healthcare still sees OSHA as an abstract concept.
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