You know you have some serious issues when you are a hospital and you are cited for not adequately defending your employees from workplace violence. According to an article in Occupation Health and Safety, Danbury Hospital, in Danbury, Connecticut was cited after an OSHA inspection, in response to employee complaints about dangers in the workplace. There were incidents were workers were injured by violent patients. There were twenty five cases during the past five years where employees went on leave or were put on restrictive duty after being injured on the job.
The citation carries with it a proposed fine of $6,300. OSHA issues citations at this level when death or serious physical harm is likely to result from hazards about which the employer knew or should have known. OSHA then demands that the employer clean up its act. The organization issued a violence prevention program that incorporates the entire hospital. The program includes a hazard/threat assessment, controls and prevention strategies, staff training and education, incident reporting and investigation, and periodic review of the program.
Background checks should always be conducted on employees. Of course, when confronted with workplace violence on the part of the patients, background searches on the health care personnel won’t do all that much good. But in order to ascertain the potential dangers that may be inflicted by patients, perhaps conducting criminal background checks on patients being admitted to the hospital. As more health care workers face dangers on the job, the idea of conducting background checks at least on patients doesn’t seem all that remote to me. I have written about workplace violence and dangers in health care centers. One such article was entitled, Workers Subjected to Workplace Violence. The article discusses how health care workers are harassed physically and psychologically. It has to be something to get up in the morning and go to work knowing that there are always the threats against one’s physical well being. No one needs that.
