Anti-OSHA groups ask for last-minute changes
Anti-OSHA groups ask for last-minute changes
Sorry,’ feds say, as finishing touches added
Two groups representing health care agencies and hospitals contend the feds have some more homework to do before they can properly move on the proposed new federal TB rule, which at press time was parked at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
The 5,000-member American Hospital Association (AHA) has petitioned OSHA and is urging members to write Congress to reopen the docket so more data can be submitted from four sources.
Those data include findings from an AHA survey still under way, intended to look at how much progress hospitals and other health care purveyors have made in implementing 1994 guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The group also wants OSHA to wait for findings from a new Institute of Medicine (IOM) TB study due out by December and commissioned by Congress to gauge the risk of TB to health care workers.
Also, the AHA argues that findings from the recently released IOM report on TB elimination deserve consideration, as do findings from an American Thoracic Society-sponsored conference held this past December, which considered ways declining TB rates in many parts of the country have affected infection control measures.
The second group, the Association for Professionals in Infection Control, also wants OSHA to wait and cites many of the same sources. Both groups have enlisted the support of U.S. Rep. Roger Wicker (R-MI). Wicker, who opposes the new OSHA TB rule, helped persuade Congress to approve $450,000 for the new IOM study now under way.
Pleas and protests notwithstanding, OSHA rulemakers say they’re moving full steam ahead. "I’m editing and filling in holes as hard as I can," says Mandy Edens, MPH, project officer for the TB standard at OSHA. "[Assistant Secretary of Labor William] Jeffers has publicly announced that he wants to get this TB standard out. We’re still shooting for [publication] sometime this year."
Still, Edens’ spring publication deadline melted into early summer, and the summer deadline has morphed into "sometime this year." The delays seem less the result of opponents’ strenuous protests than the stately pace of government, and Edens assures OSHA-bashers that not even the prospect of the IOM’s finding against the need for a new TB rule should pose insurmountable problems. "I don’t really see any new data out there we haven’t already heard," she says. "At some point, we have to go forward. If we kept postponing like this for every standard, we’d never get anything out."
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