Posts Tagged As: healthcare worker safety

Blog Post #170 – Hospital Fined $10,000 After Workers Became Ill

Excerpt from the Government of Ontario’s ‘Newsroom’

Joseph Brant Memorial Hospital Corporation, Burlington, was fined $10,000 on December 8, 2009, for a violation under the Occupational Health and Safety Act (OHSA) after workers became ill.

On April 30, 2008, Joseph Brant Memorial was informed that a patient who had just been admitted to the hospital had been in contact with scabies, a highly contagious skin rash caused by microscopic mites. The next day, the hospital’s infection control manager implemented a scabies surveillance protocol at the hospital. Hospital workers reported skin rashes from late May to late July 2008. During July, two workers were diagnosed with scabies and lost time from work.

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Blog Post #87 – Little Positive about Being Overloaded – Stress

By Emily Landau — (Emily is the editorial assistant at the OHS Canada magazine)

Work role overload is creating stress among a growing number of health care professionals, notes a report released in January.

Defining role overload as “having too many responsibilities and too little time in which to attend to them,” the review cites some of the contributing factors as understaffing, competing priorities (both at work and at home) and the organizational culture of the health care system. The last necessitates urgency, thereby making it difficult for health care providers to say “no” to any given task.

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