Hospital Employee Health
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California Lawmaker Pushes for More Mental Health Professionals in Hospitals
Employing trained mental health providers on site is important, but are there enough resources to meet the need?
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Long COVID Hits Healthcare Workers
A Government Accountability Office report estimates long COVID has “potentially affected up to 23 million Americans, pushing an estimated 1 million people out of work.” This population is a moving target — at any given time, some may be clearing it while others are just starting to succumb to its spiderweb of symptoms. Some have experienced long COVID since the beginning of the pandemic, and their return to baseline health is in question.
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Meet Lynda Enos: The Occupational Health Master
Lynda Enos is a Certified Professional Ergonomist and an occupational health expert. Hospital Employee Heath spoke with Enos between her many speaking engagements and consulting work.
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Wash Your Hands to Prevent Patient Deaths
Healthcare workers generally self-report hand hygiene compliance at much higher levels than the observers watching them. In one Japanese study, healthcare workers reported a handwashing average of 77% before touching a patient. Shockingly, the actual compliance tracked by observers was 12%.
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Harsh Criticism for New Report on ED Diagnostic Errors
New research that might have injected renewed vigor into improving diagnostic performance in the ED has instead prompted much uproar. In the emergency medicine community, that discussion has been overshadowed by biting criticism about the data and the methodologies investigators used to reach their conclusions — and what some are calling unfair blame placed at the feet of emergency providers.
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Emergency Clinicians’ Emotional Reactions to Psychiatric Patients Affect Care, Well-Being
Survey participants painted a picture of negative healthcare experiences, for both patients and clinicians, that are adversely affecting the quality of care and staff well-being. Change is badly needed to ensure these vulnerable patient populations receive care — and to support ED providers.
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Physicians’ Well-Being Top Ethics Issue
Ethicists should encourage their organizations to survey physicians to identify which factors are adversely affecting well-being. Meaningful change cannot occur without actively engaging physicians in determining what changes they believe will significantly improve their health and well-being.
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Worker Shortage, Pandemic Make Drug Diversion Easier
Drug diversion can happen quickly as healthcare workers move from one facility to another, enabled by lax reporting systems and hospital disincentives to alert patients and raise liability issues. Diverters may slip through cracks in oversight by medical and nursing boards as they move to other facilities and are lost to follow-up.
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Multistate Drug Diverter’s Plea Denied, Faces 29 More Years
When it comes to discussion and analysis of drug diversion, David Kwiatkowski is the elephant in the room. More aptly, he is in a Florida federal prison cell. A hepatis C virus carrier, Kwiatkowski was sentenced to 39 years in prison in 2013 for infecting a string of victims with HCV as he diverted drugs from multiple hospitals in eight states. Tracking back through this trail of tears, federal officials with the Department of Health and Human Services tallied 45 HCV-infected patients, two of whom died.
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FDA Streamlining COVID-19 Shot to a Single Formula
Conceding the various vaccine doses and multiple boosters have caused considerable confusion, and some degree of pandemic apathy, the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee unanimously voted to simplify and “harmonize” the process by switching to a single vaccine formula to be administered annually for most people.