Helping Southwestern Connecticut nursing and personal care facilities reduce occupational injuries and illnesses in their workplaces is the object of an upcoming free training session presented by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
The training, which will be held on Mon., Aug. 26, 2002 from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. at the North Branch Library and Community Center in Bridgeport, is designed for facility operators, safety and health managers, hospital managers and employee representatives from nursing and personal care facilities in Fairfield, New Haven and Middlesex counties, noted Robert Kowalski, OSHA’s Bridgeport Area Director.
Participants will receive training to identify and address the four major causes of worker injuries and illnesses in nursing facilities – poor ergonomics and musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs)related to resident handling; exposure to blood and other potentially infectious materials; exposure to tuberculosis; and slips, trips and falls.
The training is part of an OSHA national emphasis program focusing outreach and enforcement efforts on specific hazards in nursing and personal care facilities with high injury and illness rates.
Seating is limited, so advance registration is requested. To reserve seating, or to obtain directions or further information, call OSHA’s Bridgeport office at 203-579-5581.
Also in the news this week, the Food and Drug Administration stated that drug makers should be required to put computer-readable bar codes on their products to help cut sometimes lethal medication errors. A 1999 Institute of Medicine (IOM) Report estimated that 770,000 adverse drug events leading to injury or death occur yearly in United States hospitals. According to the report, between 28 to 95 percent of these events result from preventable errors.
As Ergoweb reported in December of 200, (Medical Errors: Human or Design) researchers believe that by first understanding and predicting human performance in the health care system, a more ‘ergonomic’ system can be designed that will reduce the number of medical errors, improving patient care and saving lives.
Throughout the patient safety movement, health care leaders have consistently referred to the potential value of the Human Factors research on human performance and system failure. Creating a durable, informative, and useful partnership between health care and those disciplines with core expertise in areas of human performance is critical to advancing patient safety.