Healthcare professionals require a safe environment so they can focus on doing what they do best—providing quality care. Unfortunately, nurses and physicians experience more violence than employees in any other industry. Medical organizations must confront this issue with a strategic workplace violence prevention plan that sets the foundation for a safe culture.
Violence in the workplace takes the form of threats, verbal abuse, or physical violence. The high-stress, emotionally charged nature of healthcare settings often fuels this behavior. When angry family members or agitated patients lash out at healthcare professionals, things can escalate quickly.
A multifaceted safety plan is the best way to prevent this. By supporting staff with training protocols and outfitting a facility with innovative tech, organizations put worker protection and high-quality care front and center.
The Importance of a Safety Leadership Team
Creating and maintaining a safe culture for healthcare professionals and patients is a full-time job. It requires planning, security implementation, and constant oversight.
A Safety Leadership Team establishes the framework by which a hospital or clinic operates. It performs risk assessments, sets goals based on the results, and develops action plans. The team also ensures employees have the tools and knowledge they need to respond to threats of workplace violence.
Healthcare organizations shouldn’t take choosing a Safety Leadership Team lightly. It should include representatives from all departments, including nurses, human resources professionals, operations managers, security personnel, and mental health workers. These team members need extensive healthcare industry experience to provide qualified insights that change how the facility approaches safety.
In addition to experience, members of a Safety Leadership Team should have a passion for helping others. They’ll act as mentors, leading by example and passing on the safety knowledge and experience they’ve accrued over the years. Their presence alone strengthens employee confidence, which is crucial for confronting threats of workplace violence head-on.
Staff Training and Education
A culture of safety in any workplace requires the active participation of employees. They must live it every day, which takes training and knowledge.
Healthcare professionals went to school to learn to help others, not react to threats of violence. Medical organizations and the Safety Leadership Team are responsible for providing the right training and keeping employees up-to-date on changes to the facility’s safety plan.
The good news for healthcare workers is that many safety techniques needed to prevent workplace violence are fairly easy to perform. For example, learning de-escalation techniques helps nurses and doctors calm down upset patients and family members before the situation turns violent or abusive.
Training staff on the facility’s safety protocols is also imperative. Every employee needs to know how to spot threats of violence and understand the procedures for emergencies such as active shooters, natural disasters, and fires.
Safety training provides several invaluable benefits:
- It gives healthcare professionals the confidence to perform their jobs without fear of violence.
- It enhances patient safety and the quality of care.
- It improves staff response time in the event of an emergency.
- It empowers employees to take an active role in the facility’s culture of safety.
Safety Leadership Teams determine what type of safety training employees need. They should also advocate for ongoing training so staff stay updated on new or existing safety protocols.
The Right Safety Technology
Innovations in safety technology have changed the way healthcare facilities monitor and respond to threats. Combined with safety training, these digital tools help organizations create a multi-layered safety plan.
Incidents in stressful, fast-paced emergency rooms and hospitals can disrupt the entire operation and compromise the safety of employees, patients, and guests. Hospital safety plans require alert technology that supports fast emergency response. This technology reduces the risk of injury and enables employees to get the help they need, regardless of where they are in the facility.
- Wearable panic buttons —These devices allow healthcare professionals to initiate a silent alert at the first sign of violence. A wearable badge has discreet, one-touch activation, keeping the situation low-key while alerting the proper parties to the type of incident and location.
- Digital access controls — Visitors to a healthcare facility can’t roam freely. Access control systems prevent this by requiring badges or biometrics to open doors to restricted areas, reducing the chance of theft, assault, or harassment.
- Digital mapping — This technology creates a digital blueprint of a facility and integrates with panic alert systems. When an employee initiates an alert, hospital administrators and security personnel can view the map to pinpoint their exact location. This is invaluable information for first responders during active shooter incidents or fires.
These tools won’t eliminate workplace violence in hospitals altogether. However, they reduce the number of incidents in a facility and mitigate the damage caused by violence or emergencies. Healthcare professionals enjoy peace of mind knowing that help is always seconds away.
Safety Audits
Creating a safe culture in the healthcare industry requires constant evolution. A safety plan must adapt and grow to meet the facility’s changing needs.
Safety audits involve a comprehensive review of a facility’s procedures, technology, staff training, and regulatory requirements. They’re typically carried out by the Safety Leadership Team each year.
Audits start with a review of a facility’s most significant safety risks. The Safety Leadership Teams analyze incident reports, identifying trends and spotting vulnerabilities in the current safety plan.
Another common step in a safety audit is a physical inspection of the facility. This helps the team identify issues such as poor lighting, a lack of safety equipment, video surveillance blind spots, and blocked emergency exits.
Because healthcare safety involves patients as well as staff, the team may review patient safety training materials to guarantee that each employee knows exactly how to protect patients in an emergency.
The Safety Leadership Team uses the completed audit to develop a plan to refine the facility’s safety plan. This involves fixing immediate issues immediately and making long-term changes that support a culture of safety.
Establishing Reporting Procedures
Detailed reporting is crucial after an incident occurs in a medical setting. It’s also a mandatory part of safety compliance.
Healthcare facilities are responsible for creating reporting procedures and training employees so they know exactly what to do after an incident. This helps the Safety Leadership Team make changes to the safety plan and reduce the chance of the incident occurring again.
Clear reporting procedures also promote a culture based on transparency. Healthcare leaders should empower staff to report all incidents, regardless of severity. This fosters trust and gives employees the confidence to take an active role in the culture of safety.
Federal and state laws require healthcare organizations to implement safety reporting systems. Hospitals, clinics, and other medical facilities face fines and legal action if they fail to have the proper systems in place.
Safety technology, such as digital mapping and panic alert buttons, includes data collection and reporting capabilities, which make the reporting process fast and accurate.
Workplace Safety Promotes Better Care
While every healthcare facility’s safety plan looks different, there’s one commonality—creating a culture of safety leads to employee happiness and a higher standard of care. Medical organizations owe it to their employees and patients to use the techniques and practices above to prevent workplace violence and make safety a top priority.