Purpose
Occupational health problems, accidents, and diseases create a lot of agonies and cost a lot of money, both for the people who are afflicted and for the community in general. Work health & safety practices, as well as occupational health promotion, are meant to prevent this. However, in addition to safeguarding personnel, this guide aims to demonstrate to healthcare administrators how to create a health-promoting nursing facility that is up to the World Health Organization (WHO) standards. This describes health as a condition of total physical, psychological, and social well-being, and the individual’s ability to maximize their health potential and successfully deal with environmental pressures. People visit health facilities to improve their health, give birth, or get immunized (Murray, 2019). However, tens of millions of patients and healthcare workers are in danger of infection when seeking treatment or working in health facilities that lack essential services such as water, hygiene, and healthcare waste and cleaning. In addition to jeopardizing patient safety and dignity, a lack of hygiene services in healthcare institutions can hasten the development of antimicrobial-resistant illnesses and impede worldwide efforts to enhance child and maternal health. As a result, occupational health and wellbeing must be viewed as vital business goals and values, just like excellent customer service, efficiency, development, and profitability.
Such high levels of health proficiency among employees can only be attained if the firm adopts a preventative culture that consistently incorporates health-related considerations into all business decisions. When occupational health and safety are incorporated into a management system, it is also easier to establish a safe and healthy work environment for employees. Risk assessment is a continuous process that must be done regularly, with the results recorded and incorporated into management’s strategic planning and implementation. Above all, the management must act as a role model in terms of its behavior. As a result, it has a significant influence on company culture and causes behavioral changes among employees. Considering this, I have developed an industrial hygiene procedure for a nursing facility to anticipate, recognize, evaluate, and control industrial exposures to potential hazards such as chemical, microbiological, and physical hazards. The procedure will include the management of data linked to these risks. The purpose of this approach is to protect the health of all employees by evaluating the following factors and providing suggestions for remedial action where necessary:
- Adherence to all approved permissible exposure limits
- The likelihood for an employee to be exposed to occupational dangers
- Processes and tasks that potentially expose workers to potential hazards in the workplace
- Whether the exposure control devices and methods are efficient
- Employee exposure as a consequence of changes in operations, equipment, or materials
Scope
This Industrial hygiene procedure applies to all nursing institutions with the potential for working exposures that might result in illness, compromised health, or considerable pain among personnel and patients in the nursing industry. Assessments and industrial hygiene studies must be carried out under the supervision and guidance of an Environmental Health and Safety Specialist.
This paper has two major purposes; the first is to propose a practical hygiene program that nursing companies may use on a national and sub-national level to enhance health care facility hygiene. The second goal is to compile a federal response to the United Nations sanitation initiative. This paper’s primary target audiences are national health officials, district health administrators, quality experts and implementers, and medical institution executives and employees. National hygiene and health stakeholders, federal water and sanitation authorities, researchers, and civil society are among the other audiences.
Definitions
Industrial Hygiene (IH). A discipline dedicated to anticipating, recognizing, evaluating, and controlling the environmental elements and pressures connected with employment and industrial processes that may cause disease, compromised health, or considerable pain.
Administrative Controls. Changes to work practices, such as written safety regulations, rules, supervision, and training, manage employee exposure to minimize the length, frequency, and severity of exposure to occupational hazards.
Control Measures. Actions made to reduce or eliminate possible industrial hazard exposures. The following are examples of control measures: Personal Protective Equipment (PPEs), Engineering Controls, and Administrative Controls.
Engineering Controls. Measures made to minimize or lessen occupational dangers by using (or substituting) designed machinery or equipment.
Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). PPEs are all clothes and other work items meant to provide a barrier against working risks. Safety goggles, hard helmets, blast shields, hearing protection, gloves, respiratory protection, aprons, and steel-toed boots are other personal protective gear.
Permissible Exposure Limit – An allowed amount of time for an employee’s exposure to a physical or chemical contaminant. OSHA establishes PELs (Permissible Exposure Limits).
Roles and Responsibilities
The provision of a healthy and safe workplace is a management responsibility. Employers are required to take the appropriate steps to protect employees’ health and safety. Preventing occupational dangers, providing knowledge and training, and providing the required organization and means are all key considerations for occupational health and safety. Employers bear the primary duty of identifying and analyzing workplace risks. They must make certain that these activities are carried out appropriately. They must seek professional guidance either internally, through occupational health and safety experts and occupational specialists, or externally, with the use of external agencies, if they do not have the requisite knowledge.
Health Ministry
The main role of the Ministry of Health in hygiene is to create and execute national cleanliness standards for healthcare institutions. The ministry is also responsible for providing frequent in-service hygiene training to ensure an adequate and skilled workforce is available in all healthcare facilities. The health ministry should ensure enough money is disbursed for hygiene in healthcare institutions and ensure that budget distribution to the most underprivileged areas is prioritized. It is also the responsibility of the health ministry to assist with the procurement, installation, and administration of hygiene tools and technology. Finally, the ministry should regularly track and distribute data on sanitation services given to health care institutions from water providers and authorities.
Facility Directors, Managers, and Supervisors
Facility managers should oversee the execution of the facility-level policies and standards on hygiene and ascertain that all personnel know their obligations stipulated under the industrial hygiene program. The directors or managers should establish defined targets and measures collaborating with the health ministry to decrease patient and staff exposure to occupational risks. They should also request technical support from the Ministry of Health whenever needed. Another responsibility of the directors, managers, or supervisors of health facilities is to formulate plans to resolve inadequacies highlighted by environmentalists or risk monitoring in collaboration with the Ministry of Health. This is to ensure that appropriate corrective steps are taken to decrease staff or patient exposure to hazards. Finally, they should maintain regular and transparent dialogue on the industrial hygiene program’s execution with the whole team.
Nursing Practitioners and General Staff
All nurses and general staff members should take excellent and timely use of control measures such as PPEs, ventilation, etc. They should analyze and comprehend the industrial hygiene program’s requirements and obligations and diligently follow the hygiene norms and procedures that have been established by the ministry of health or the facility managers. The staff members should also feel free to make suggestions for enhancing current work procedures to decrease occupational hazard exposures and report conditions that might expose them to work dangers. Whenever needed, staff members and nursing practitioners should participate in industrial hygiene inspections.
Procedures
Assessment and Situation Analysis on Facility Hygiene
Situation analysis and a review of present hygiene services in health care facilities offer a foundation for planning and resource mobilization. Whether particular to the quality of care, maternity and child health, or disaster planning and response, the situation analysis needs to determine all current standards, policies, and plans that integrate hygiene in health care facilities. In addition, the situation analysis determines financing streams, budgeting, and performance measures. Facility visits should be included in good situation analysis to ensure the accuracy of monitoring data and gain perspective from staff, care seekers, health, and other community organizations.
Setting Goals and Creating a Road-map
An adequately defined joint hygiene team can be an effective tool for defining a roadmap, setting goals, offering professional leadership, and collaborating on implementation activities. The task force’s first mission is to set goals and develop a hygiene roadmap for healthcare institutions based on scenario analysis and examination, considering the unique requirements of vulnerable populations and neglected areas and facilities. All stakeholders must support and measure progress toward agreed-upon goals once the blueprint is in place, giving precedence to government-favored tools and techniques over partner or donor choices.
Establishing Standards and Accountability Mechanisms
To enforce, monitor, and regulate health services, standards and policies for hygiene in health care institutions are required. Measures should be comprehensive, detailed enough to give practical technical recommendations, and localized. Hygiene standards should be incorporated in quality-of-care guidelines, cholera prevention, and management plans, and nationally agreed to policies and strategies after being formed. Identifying similar goals and collectively monitoring and analyzing success is one effective strategy to incorporate standards into health initiatives. Standards must be complemented by adequate monitoring and resources for execution.
Improving and Maintaining Infrastructure
Equipment for hygiene and waste management in health care facilities must be acceptable and suited for the local environment, the nursing facility’s size, and its services. Finance institutions, government organizations, and contractors are all required to be involved in most big infrastructure investments. An infrastructure plan can assist in defining the scope of work and estimating costs for a specific institution or site. The ongoing operation and maintenance of sophisticated hygienic infrastructure necessitate allocating resources such as energy, supply chains, and qualified personnel. As a result, healthcare institutions should factor in continuing operations and maintenance costs and capabilities in their infrastructure planning.
Developing a Healthy Workforce
Health systems would perform effectively and respond appropriately to issues with well-trained, well-supported, and devoted personnel. Staff members of healthcare facilities are entitled to work in a setting that ensures their occupational health and safety while allowing them to do their jobs to the best of their abilities. As a result, all levels of health care employees should receive pre-service and in-service training and mentorship, emphasizing the need for excellent cleanliness. To execute their profession safely and successfully, health facility cleaners and trash operators require additional knowledge and abilities.
Engaging Communities
People in the community play a vital role in guaranteeing that healthcare institutions offer the amount of care that residents expect and need. Community members often can give technical skills and should be consulted about hygiene facility design and use options. Because patients may be hesitant to speak out about problems in their local healthcare institutions, it may be good to look at anonymous or more discreet ways to submit feedback, employing methods that do not omit low-literacy people. To assist develop, enhancing, and manage hygiene solutions that fulfill user demands, such procedures should be included in quality improvement cycles.
Conducting Operational Research and Share Learning
A more solid scientific foundation for cleanliness in healthcare institutions can encourage more action and investment. When the results of each test are refined and communicated, they may lead to continuous improvement, invention, and the scaling-up of established methods. Operational research necessitates recording what was done and how it was done and the issues that have arisen, and how they were resolved. In many cases, it may be desirable to quantify the effectiveness of hygiene measures in healthcare institutions using indirect variables such as the use of services, staff and patient comfort, and visual hygiene instead of medical outcomes.
Communications & Survey Results Analysis
Each industrial hygiene risk assessment will result in a written report. Reports must be examined and, if necessary, a remedial action plan devised. After samples have been sent to a laboratory for examination in the instance of biohazard exposure, exposure monitoring reports should be generated.
Regardless of their exposure level, employees must be advised in writing of their exposure monitoring findings. For any health hazard or exposure discovered above a legal limit, as assessed by exposure monitoring, each study must establish a documented remedial action plan. A deadline for corrective activities and methods to decrease or eliminate the exposure must be included in corrective action plans. Isolation of a process or machinery, replacement of components, change of a procedure, safeguards, and the use of Personal Protective Equipment are examples of these actions. To guarantee that remedial actions are successful, corrective action plans must contain procedures for ongoing monitoring (Watson et al, 2019).
In the event that exposures or hygiene hazards are found to be over a regulatory level due to industrial hygiene monitoring. In that case, the facility must promptly adopt appropriate exposure controls to bring employee exposure below the regulatory limit. Following the implementation of the measures, ongoing monitoring is required to verify that employee exposures remain within the statutory limits. It is necessary to document the steps done. Engineering controls, administrative/work practice controls, and personal protective equipment will be used to establish exposure controls linked to Industrial Hygiene.
References
Murray, L. R. (2019). Occupational health and safety. Social Injustice and Public Health, 387-412. Web.
Watson, J., D’Mello-Guyett, L., Flynn, E., Falconer, J., Esteves-Mills, J., Prual, A.,… & Cumming, O. (2019). Interventions to improve water supply and quality, sanitation and handwashing facilities in healthcare facilities, and their effect on healthcare-associated infections in low-income and middle-income countries: a systematic review and supplementary scoping review. BMJ global health, 4(4), e001632. Web.