The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the risks and challenges that healthcare workers face every day. This includes injuries, infections, violence, and avoidable safety-related incidents. Due to the stressful environment that these workers struggle with, they are more prone to errors which can lead to patient harm. The World Health Organisation’s World Patient Safety Day (WPSD) …
Preventing the Risk of Scalpel Injuries to Livestock Handlers
Livestock handlers undertake surgical castration with scalpels to remove testicles from male animals such as cows or swine. Livestock handlers are often exposed to occupational health risks of scalpel cuts and injuries during castration procedures. As sharps injuries have been observed in veterinarian practices associated with large animals, it is important for livestock handlers to …
Risks of Scalpel Injuries in Autopsies
Working in a autopsies can be demanding and often requires complex dissection using scalpels. Autopsy surgeons, forensic pathologists, and the personnel who assist in conducting autopsies are at risk of scalpel cuts and injuries. Scalpel cuts carry the associated risk of acquiring various kinds of viral and bacterial infections from contagious body fluids and soft …
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How to Evaluate Safety Implementation in Healthcare
As we know, having a safety plan is extremely important in healthcare. Risks of injury can incur financial costs to a facility, and have physical and emotional effects on injured healthcare workers. For these reasons, it is important to be able to effectively implement safety plans and measures to mitigate identified risks to safety. The …
Translating Safety into Practice: Sharps Safety Example
En español In the last blog, we talked about investing in healthcare worker safety has proven long-term benefits, and how organisations can start investing in their worker’s safety. In this blog, we take a deeper look at translating safety into practice, using sharps safety as an example. Healthcare is a complex system, and implementing sharps …
Podiatrists and Scalpel Cuts – Understanding the Risks and How to Prevent Them
Podiatrists use scalpels every day during patient care. They are one of the most frequent users of scalpel blades in any profession. Because of this, removing scalpel blades without the right tool increases their risks of a sharps cut(1). Scalpel cuts can cause: Severed digital nerve and/or tendon Psychological distress and/or trauma Delayed procedures and …