by
John W. Mitchell, Senior Correspondent | February 09, 2015
From the January/February 2015 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
“I spent all night going through the building with the fire chief to figure out what happened and it was an obvious safety policy violation. The next morning I met with the CEO and COO, with whom I had good relationships, to ask how they planned to hold the employee accountable. Their answer was, “We’ll talk to him.” Of course, that’s not going to prevent another fire. Later, I learned the researcher brought in a $50 million-research grant and had been exempt from safety training. So I knew what values were important to that organization – and so did their employees.”
He says part of the problem is that making changes to save $100,000 in an injury claim expense in an organization as big as a hospital, for example, which can have hundreds of millions in revenue, seems like a lot of effort for a little return.
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“I understand that senior executives have a lot of competing priorities,” he says. “But if nothing else, a 10 to15 percent increase in workers’ comp insurance a year is going to add up eventually. It’s worth the effort to make a workplace safer.”
The top five common issues related to workplace injuries:
1 No safety policy or an outdated policy
2 Ignoring safety policies (no enforcement)
3 Poor safety training/prevention
4 Poor incident reporting
5 A culture of injury denial (blaming the injured)
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