Traditionally, health care worker injury exposure data is analyzed one category at a time, which tends to isolate the researcher from a more global perspective of an industry-wide analysis. The Epidemic of Health Care Worker Injury: An Epidemiology provides an industry-wide analysis that facilitates a wide-angle view of the dangers of working in health care, by focusing on the major categories of health care worker injury: needlesticks, the most prevalent risk back injury, the most expensive risk violence and assault-health care workers account for more than half of all assaulted service workers infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and hepatitis C latex allergy, which now affects almost 10% of health-care workers managed care and its profound effect on the injury rates through downsizing, deskilling, and increased acuity injuries to different populations of health care workers home health care injury rates long-term care injuries, which have doubled in the last decade
"Suffering is an unavoidable reality in health care. Not only are patients and families suffering but also the clinicians who care for them. Commonly the suffering experienced by clinicians is moral in nature, reflecting the increasing complexity of health care, their roles within it, and the expanding range of available interventions. Moral suffering is the anguish experienced in response to various forms of moral adversity including moral harms, wrongs or failures, or unrelieved moral stress. Confronting moral adversity challenges clinicians' integrity: the inner harmony that arises when their essential values and commitments are aligned with their choices and actions. The most studied response to moral adversity is moral distress. The sources and sequelae of moral distress, one type of moral suffering, have been documented among clinicians across specialties. Recent interest has expanded to include a more corrosive form of moral suffering, moral injury. Moral resilience, the capacity to restore or sustain integrity in response to moral adversity, offers a path designing individual and system solutions to address moral suffering. It encompasses capacities aimed at developing self- regulation and self-awareness, buoyancy, moral efficacy, self-stewardship and ultimately personal and relational integrity. Moral resilience has been shown to be a protective resource that reduces the detrimental impact of moral suffering. Clinicians and healthcare organizations must work together to transform moral suffering by cultivating the individual capacities for moral resilience and designing a new architecture to support ethical practice. Used worldwide for scalable and sustainable change, the Conscious Full Spectrum Response, offers a method to solve problems to support integrity, shift patterns that undermine moral resilience and ethical practice, and source the inner potential of clinicians and leaders to produce meaningful and sustainable results that benefit all"--
The first book to explore the idea and effect of moral injury on veterans, their families, and their communities Although veterans make up only 7 percent of the U.S. population, they account for an alarming 20 percent of all suicides. And though treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder has undoubtedly alleviated suffering and allowed many service members returning from combat to transition to civilian life, the suicide rate for veterans under thirty has been increasing. Research by Veterans Administration health professionals and veterans’ own experiences now suggest an ancient but unaddressed wound of war may be a factor: moral injury. This deep-seated sense of transgression includes feelings of shame, grief, meaninglessness, and remorse from having violated core moral beliefs. Rita Nakashima Brock and Gabriella Lettini, who both grew up in families deeply affected by war, have been working closely with vets on what moral injury looks like, how vets cope with it, and what can be done to heal the damage inflicted on soldiers’ consciences. In Soul Repair, the authors tell the stories of four veterans of wars from Vietnam to our current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan—Camillo “Mac” Bica, Herman Keizer Jr., Pamela Lightsey, and Camilo Mejía—who reveal their experiences of moral injury from war and how they have learned to live with it. Brock and Lettini also explore its effect on families and communities, and the community processes that have gradually helped soldiers with their moral injuries. Soul Repair will help veterans, their families, members of their communities, and clergy understand the impact of war on the consciences of healthy people, support the recovery of moral conscience in society, and restore veterans to civilian life. When a society sends people off to war, it must accept responsibility for returning them home to peace.
Despite many advances, 20 American workers die each day as a result of occupational injuries. And occupational safety and health (OSH) is becoming even more complex as workers move away from the long-term, fixed-site, employer relationship. This book looks at worker safety in the changing workplace and the challenge of ensuring a supply of top-notch OSH professionals. Recommendations are addressed to federal and state agencies, OSH organizations, educational institutions, employers, unions, and other stakeholders. The committee reviews trends in workforce demographics, the nature of work in the information age, globalization of work, and the revolution in health care deliveryâ€"exploring the implications for OSH education and training in the decade ahead. The core professions of OSH (occupational safety, industrial hygiene, and occupational medicine and nursing) and key related roles (employee assistance professional, ergonomist, and occupational health psychologist) are profiled-how many people are in the field, where they work, and what they do. The book reviews in detail the education, training, and education grants available to OSH professionals from public and private sources.
The workplace is where 156 million working adults in the United States spend many waking hours, and it has a profound influence on health and well-being. Although some occupations and work-related activities are more hazardous than others and face higher rates of injuries, illness, disease, and fatalities, workers in all occupations face some form of work-related safety and health concerns. Understanding those risks to prevent injury, illness, or even fatal incidents is an important function of society. Occupational safety and health (OSH) surveillance provides the data and analyses needed to understand the relationships between work and injuries and illnesses in order to improve worker safety and health and prevent work-related injuries and illnesses. Information about the circumstances in which workers are injured or made ill on the job and how these patterns change over time is essential to develop effective prevention programs and target future research. The nation needs a robust OSH surveillance system to provide this critical information for informing policy development, guiding educational and regulatory activities, developing safer technologies, and enabling research and prevention strategies that serves and protects all workers. A Smarter National Surveillance System for Occupational Safety and Health in the 21st Century provides a comprehensive assessment of the state of OSH surveillance. This report is intended to be useful to federal and state agencies that have an interest in occupational safety and health, but may also be of interest broadly to employers, labor unions and other worker advocacy organizations, the workers' compensation insurance industry, as well as state epidemiologists, academic researchers, and the broader public health community. The recommendations address the strengths and weaknesses of the envisioned system relative to the status quo and both short- and long-term actions and strategies needed to bring about a progressive evolution of the current system.
Experts estimate that as many as 98,000 people die in any given year from medical errors that occur in hospitals. That's more than die from motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer, or AIDSâ€"three causes that receive far more public attention. Indeed, more people die annually from medication errors than from workplace injuries. Add the financial cost to the human tragedy, and medical error easily rises to the top ranks of urgent, widespread public problems. To Err Is Human breaks the silence that has surrounded medical errors and their consequenceâ€"but not by pointing fingers at caring health care professionals who make honest mistakes. After all, to err is human. Instead, this book sets forth a national agendaâ€"with state and local implicationsâ€"for reducing medical errors and improving patient safety through the design of a safer health system. This volume reveals the often startling statistics of medical error and the disparity between the incidence of error and public perception of it, given many patients' expectations that the medical profession always performs perfectly. A careful examination is made of how the surrounding forces of legislation, regulation, and market activity influence the quality of care provided by health care organizations and then looks at their handling of medical mistakes. Using a detailed case study, the book reviews the current understanding of why these mistakes happen. A key theme is that legitimate liability concerns discourage reporting of errorsâ€"which begs the question, "How can we learn from our mistakes?" Balancing regulatory versus market-based initiatives and public versus private efforts, the Institute of Medicine presents wide-ranging recommendations for improving patient safety, in the areas of leadership, improved data collection and analysis, and development of effective systems at the level of direct patient care. To Err Is Human asserts that the problem is not bad people in health careâ€"it is that good people are working in bad systems that need to be made safer. Comprehensive and straightforward, this book offers a clear prescription for raising the level of patient safety in American health care. It also explains how patients themselves can influence the quality of care that they receive once they check into the hospital. This book will be vitally important to federal, state, and local health policy makers and regulators, health professional licensing officials, hospital administrators, medical educators and students, health caregivers, health journalists, patient advocatesâ€"as well as patients themselves. First in a series of publications from the Quality of Health Care in America, a project initiated by the Institute of Medicine
These guidelines have been prepared by the International Labour Office in order to assist employers and national organisations with practical advice on implementing and improving occupational safety and health (OSH) management systems, in order to reduce work-related injuries, occupational ill health and diseases and unsafe working conditions. The guidelines may be applied on two levels: they provide a national OSH framework for legal and voluntary regulatory standards; and encourage the integration of OSH management principles with overall policy management at the organisational level.
This text provides a theoretical and empirical approach to investigating the nature of emerging OSH (Occupational Health and Safety) epidemics across the industrialized world. The author of each chapter in this book deals with exposure to a particular OSH hazard and examines the epidemic nature of the resulting ill-health or injury outcome. The authors also evaluate the contribution of globalization and neoliberal policies in creating workplace environments which foster such new OSH epidemics.
This contributed volume reflects on the collective wisdom and ongoing efforts of the social work profession that has been in the forefront of the global pandemic of COVID-19. The contributors are seasoned social work academics, practitioners, administrators, and researchers. Working on the frontlines with patients and families, these social workers have garnered experiences and insights, and also have developed innovative ways to mitigate the impact of the coronavirus on the psychosocial well-being of their clients and themselves. The 36 reflections, experiences, and insights in this curated collection address the behavioral, mental health, socioeconomic, and other repercussions of the coronavirus pandemic that have impacted their client base, most of whom are vulnerable populations: Repurposed, Reassigned, Redeployed Safety Planning with Survivors of Domestic Violence: How COVID-19 Shifts the Focus COVID-19 and Moral Distress/Moral Anguish Therapeutic Support for Healthcare Workers in Acute Care: Our Voice Shared Trauma and Harm Reduction in the Time of COVID-19 Wholeheartedness in the Treatment of Shared Trauma: Special Considerations During the COVID-19 Pandemic The Role of Ecosocial Work During the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Natural World Black Lives, Mass Incarceration, and the Perpetuity of Trauma in the Era of COVID-19: The Road to Abolition Social Work Teaching Social Work Practice in the Shared Trauma of a Global Pandemic The COVID-19 Self-Care Survival Guide: A Framework for Clinicians to Categorize and Utilize Self-Care Strategies and Practices Shared Trauma, Shared Resilience During a Pandemic: Social Work in the Time of COVID-19 is an early and essential work on the impact of the pandemic on the social work field with useful practice wisdom for a broad audience. It can be assigned in masters-level social work practice and elective courses on trauma, as well as inform both neophyte and experienced practitioners. It also would appeal to the general public interested in the work of social workers during a pandemic.
A NEW AND ESSENTIAL RESOURCE FOR THE PRACTICE OF EPIDEMIOLOGY AND PUBLIC HEALTH The CDC Field Epidemiology Manual is a definitive guide to investigating acute public health events on the ground and in real time. Assembled and written by experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as other leading public health agencies, it offers current and field-tested guidance for every stage of an outbreak investigation -- from identification to intervention and other core considerations along the way. Modeled after Michael Gregg's seminal book Field Epidemiology, this CDC manual ushers investigators through the core elements of field work, including many of the challenges inherent to outbreaks: working with multiple state and federal agencies or multinational organizations; legal considerations; and effective utilization of an incident-management approach. Additional coverage includes: � Updated guidance for new tools in field investigations, including the latest technologies for data collection and incorporating data from geographic information systems (GIS) � Tips for investigations in unique settings, including healthcare and community-congregate sites � Advice for responding to different types of outbreaks, including acute enteric disease; suspected biologic or toxic agents; and outbreaks of violence, suicide, and other forms of injury For the ever-changing public health landscape, The CDC Field Epidemiology Manual offers a new, authoritative resource for effective outbreak response to acute and emerging threats. *** Oxford University Press will donate a portion of the proceeds from this book to the CDC Foundation, an independent nonprofit and the sole entity created by Congress to mobilize philanthropic and private-sector resources to support the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's critical health protection work. To learn more about the CDC Foundation, visit www.cdcfoundation.org.
