Creating a Culture of Healthcare Worker Safety: A Strategic Imperative

Recognizing healthcare workplace safety is a prerequisite for patient safety, hospitals and other healthcare providers should prioritize staff health and safety and create a culture that promotes open communication, reporting of safety concerns, and the implementation of preventive measures to ensure a safe and healthy work environment for all employees. The following are key strategic actions healthcare organizations can take:

1. Incorporate healthcare worker health and safety into the overall patient safety policies and strategies

There can be no patient safety without healthcare worker safety, as both are inseparably connected in practice. Health and safety risks to healthcare workers can lead to risks for patients, patient harm, and adverse patient outcome. Healthcare providers should give equal priority to healthcare worker safety and take a holistic approach in managing healthcare worker safety, patient safety, quality improvement and infection prevention and control programmes. This strategic change can contribute to safer and quality care, reducing costs due to healthcare worker attrition and suboptimal productivity. Hospital management needs to:

• Incorporate workplace safety and health (WSH) policies and guidelines into the organizational policies and guidelines on safety.
• Promote awareness on healthcare worker health and safety.
• Provide training programs on health and safety skills pertaining to staff safety and patient safety to all healthcare workers.
• Include WSH incidents in patient safety incident reporting system.
• Develop performance indicators on healthcare worker safety, along with patent safety and quality of care indicators.

2. Protect healthcare workers from violence in the workplace

Violence in the workplace occurs in the form of abuse, harassment, and discrimination. Healthcare workers across the world face physical and psychological violence in their daily work. These threats directly affect morale and hamper retention of healthcare workers and can lead to reductions in patient safety and quality of care. Within this context, hospital management needs to:

• Implement policies and guidelines to protect healthcare workers against violence. 
• Promote a culture of zero tolerance of violence against healthcare workers.
• Establish relevant implementation mechanisms, such as helplines and anonymous reporting of incidents.
• Render support for any healthcare workers facing violence.

3. Improve mental health and physical well-being of healthcare workers

Many healthcare workers work in high-demand, high-risk and high-stress work settings for long hours. This makes them susceptible to mental health and psychological well-being issues. The link between negative working conditions and employee stress is well researched. Work stress and burnout are also associated with quality of patient care and patient safety. Healthcare workers should be given access to psychological support and able to report safety concerns without fear of retaliation. Within this context, there is a need to:

• Establish policies to ensure appropriate working hours and rest breaks.
• Maintain appropriate staffing levels.
• Minimize the administrative burden of healthcare workers.
• Promote a blame-free and just working culture through open communication.
• Provide access to mental wellbeing and social support services to healthcare workers.

4. Protect healthcare workers from physical and biological hazards.

Healthcare workers in hospitals face multiple physical, biological, and ergonomic hazards including exposure to infections, sharps, falls, radiation, chemicals or musculoskeletal disorders due to poor ergonomics in handling patients and lifting heavy equipment. Management can take the following actions: 

• Ensure the implementation of minimum patient safety, infection prevention and control, and occupational safety standards in all healthcare facilities across the health system;
• Always ensure the availability of personal protective equipment (PPE). Undertake adequate training on the appropriate use of PPE and safety precautions;
• Ensure vaccination of all at-risk healthcare workers against vaccine preventable infections. In the event of virus outbreak, giving healthcare workers priority access to the available vaccines;
• Provide adequate resources and training to prevent healthcare workers from injury and harmful exposure to chemicals and radiation;
• Provide functioning and ergonomically designed equipment and workstations to minimize musculoskeletal injuries and falls.

Source: Adopted from WHO Charter on Health Worker Safety: A Priority for Patient Safety