Workforce Safety in Connection to Patient Safety

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Overview
Conclusion
References

Introduction

This paper explores how poor safety of medical workers may negatively affect patient care. The safety of medical personnel, particularly nurses and physicians, is directly connected to patient safety. Unsafe work conditions can negatively affect nurses’ high-level clinical judgment. There are healthcare initiatives that can improve the consequences of the issue but it is crucial to identify their limitations. Inadequate workforce safety also has broader implications on other issues in healthcare, such as incident reporting and clinician burnout. Unsafe work environments also create the need for advancing communication.

Overview

Medical professionals face hazardous workplace environments and continuous moral distress, which contributes to an increased rate of adverse preventable consequences, both personal and professional. (The Joint Commission, 2012). Personal unwanted consequences may include developing chronic medical conditions, clinician burnout, and occupational non-fatal injuries. Poor workforce safety may endanger patients due to nurses’ lapses in judgment, their decreased motivation and inadequate communication. If medical professionals themselves are unwell or unsafe, they cannot exercise the best clinical judgment and provide high-quality patient care. Thus, the physical and mental well-being of medical professionals is directly connected to patients’ safety.

Need for high-level clinical judgment: Violence

Due to their accessible nature, hospitals allow for a broad spectrum of violent threats that affect both personnel and patients. This creates the need for nurses to constantly be alert and to exhibit a high level of clinical judgment to account for and recognize potential threats to themselves and others. Additionally, home care settings can endanger nurses if they work alone or at non-standard hours (The Joint Commission, 2012). Moreover, constantly worrying about one’s safety may overload nurses’ attention span and result in missing critical details while attending to a patient. Therefore, securing physical conditions and relevant training is essential to balance clinicians’ focus and prevent violent interactions.

Need for high-level clinical judgment: Infectious agents

Working in a hospital environment creates a risk of unintended exposure to infectious agents, resulting in serious complications or even death (The Joint Commission, 2012). Thus, nurses need to exercise a high-level clinical judgment to protect themselves and their patients by recognizing early signs of an infection, adopting practices to avoid infection transmission, and correctly utilizing personal protective equipment (PPE). (The Joint Commission, 2012). Relevant training, safety planning, and comprehensive guidelines are essential to reduce occupational transmission.

Health initiatives

There are various means to improve workforce safety. Implementing organizational strategies can help to make immediate physical surroundings more secure to prevent violence, infection transmission, radiation leaks, and exposure to hazardous substances (The Joint Commission, 2012). Eliminating nursing shifts longer than 12 hours is recommended by the Institute of Medicine (as cited in The Joint Commission, 2012). Such an approach can potentially reduce occupational injuries and performance errors by decreasing sleep deprivation, which contributes to slowed reaction time, inadequate problem solving, and inattentiveness. Relevant training in how to prevent and recognize potential violence can also be helpful.

Emerging issues

The proposed health initiatives have their limitations and thus can sometimes be hard or impossible to implement. It might be harder to secure certain parts of the hospital setting, such as the emergency room and the psychiatric ward (The Joint Commission, 2012). The nationwide staff and funds shortage can render more lenient working hours unlikely. Moreover, a large proportion of nursing professionals depend on overtime despite its downsides and negative impact on their health and work-life balance. (NASEM, 2019).

Clinician burnout

Unsafe workforce conditions, particularly clinician burnout, have wider implications on other patient safety initiatives. According to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM, 2019), there is a link between burnout and decreased job performance, particularly medical errors, omission of necessary care, and lapses in judgment. Burnout also contributes to increased absenteeism and reduced productivity among nurses). This trend has catastrophic economic and societal costs, especially during a nationwide shortage of medical professionals (NASEM, 2019). As a result, a lack of motivation among nurses can halt the implementation of positive patient-care practices, such as increasing patient engagement and education.

Inadequate incident reporting systems

Unsafe work conditions also affect effective communication and improvement. Inadequate incident reporting systems can halt performance improvement and contribute to continuous endangerment of the staff. For example, a system that requires reporting both patients’ falls and “near-miss” falls, when a clinician received an injury to prevent the patient from obtaining one, allows for finding the cause of such instances (The Joint Commission, 2012). Reporting patient-and-staff incidents can help increase staff safety by devising plans to prevent injuries for both parties, not just the patients.

Improving communication

Unsafe working conditions also create room for certain communication issues. According to the Joint Commission (2013), communication failure was one of the top contributing root causes of adverse events reported from 2004 to 2011. Feeling unsafe in one’s working environment can contribute to one’s reluctance to ask questions openly. By fostering a safe working atmosphere and encouraging information exchange, a healthcare institution can improve nurses’ critical thinking skills, which directly benefits the patient. Rotations longer than 12 hours deprivation impair cognitive functions and cause irritability, negatively affecting effective communication. Adequate working hours can improve nurses’ communication and, as a result, their performance. If nursing staff is not informed about potential hazards of in-home care, it can put them in serious danger. A safety program to develop a risk prevention strategy is essential.

Conclusion

Workforce safety presents a fundamental component in providing exceptional care for patients. Unsafe working conditions contribute to many issues, including violence, exposure to dangerous substances, miscommunication, and physical and mental disorders. It is crucial to implement relevant strategies and policies to achieve a synergy of personnel safety and patient safety.

References

The Joint Commission. (2012). Improving patient and worker safety: Opportunities for synergy, collaboration and innovation. Web.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2019). Taking action against clinician burnout: A systems approach to professional well-being.

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