by
John W. Mitchell, Senior Correspondent | February 09, 2015
From the January/February 2015 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Since all states mandate employer obligations to injured workers, a company’s leadership needs to focus on workplace injuries, he adds. “Companies are really good at making rules that don’t work,” says Jim Murphy, who has served in a wide range of human resources and organizational development management positions, including for the City of Boston and Massachusetts Bay Organizational Development Learning Group. He now acts as a consultant through his own firm, Management 3000. He notes that a common mistake he sees is that a company has a safety policy – most often linked to a new employee handbook – and they call it good. But if that’s as far as the effort goes, it’s far from good.
“You have to make sure you are dealing in the real world with your people,” he explains. “Employees learn how to ignore the rules, especially those that don’t seem to apply to them or are not reinforced by their manager. So it’s important to allow employees a voice in the policies designed to keep them safe.”
In hospitals, this fact of human nature can be seen in the stats for nursing injuries. Nurses have access to many types of equipment designed to prevent injury to caregivers when lifting patients. Yet according to a landmark study released in 2013 by the Lucian Leaps Institute titled “Through the Eyes of the Workforce” up to a third of health care workers suffer back or musculoskeletal injuries every year related to lifts, as well as exposure to blood borne pathogens through preventable events like needle sticks or respiratory compromise. Beth Boynton, a nurse and workplace safety advocate who is writing a textbook on the subject, says employers often create adversarial relationships with employees in their response to an injury claim.
“Sure there are some malingerers who work the system, but treating every injured worker like a suspect turns injury management into a self-fulfilling prophecy of conflict. The injury becomes a source of power for the employee because that’s all they have to negotiate with,” she says. “This kind of attitude does not help recovery and it doesn’t help prevent future workplace accidents.”
There’s a lot of shame and guilt when people get hurt on the job – both on the part of the employee and the employer, says Management 3000’s Murphy. “Most organizations hesitate to expose emotions, but people need the ability to speak up.”
Underscoring this point is Boynton’s personal experience as a nurse. “Early in my career I was choked by a patient who was going through heroin withdrawal. Fortunately, I wasn’t seriously injured, but the doctor who was on the floor dismissed the incident like it was just part of the job,” says Boynton. “There was no concern about how I felt [about] being attacked,” she says.
