hospital

Friday Five – 3/10/17

Quin Bond, CEAS IIILeave a comment

The Friday Five is a set of five links that I have come across this week that pertain to ergonomics, occupational health, safety, human performance, or human factors.  For whatever reason, I found them interesting, but they are provided with minimal or no commentary and are not meant to be endorsement for a given product.

The news media this morning had several stories noting that beginning in July medical residents may work consecutively from 16 hours to 24 hours.  Interestingly, there were many medical residents that were in favor of this change.   Taking this change to resident’s shifts and the upcoming changing of the clocks for Daylight Saving Time, this Friday Five is focused on shift work.

Some residents looked forward to the increased hours as a way of reducing mid-case handoff of ER cases due to hitting the 16 hour mark.  A research letter by Charlie Wray, DO et al. in JAMA looked at handoff policies for residents at hospitals as implemenation of these practices, despite guidelines, is left to each hospital to implement.

A study published last year investigated the effect of hours per week worked by an admitting resident on patient outcomes.  It found that individuals admitted by residents working 80+ hours per week had longer hospital stays and more ICU transfers than those admitted by residents working less than 80 hours per week.  However, there did not appear to be a relationship between hours worked and 30 day readmission rates or in-hospital mortality rates.

Fernando and Roswell looked at the work performed during nursing shifts and noted that the types of work and volume of work performed varied through a 24 hour work cycle.  They note that the scheduling of shifts needs to take type of work and work volume into account.

Two older studies looked at the incidence of work related injuries following onset of Daylight Saving Time.  A study of American mine workers found an increase in injuries on the Monday following the start of DST and a decrease in total sleep for that night by 40 minutes.  A Canadian study found no statistical relationship between injuries and the onset of DST.

Interestingly,  researchers found that the rate of ischemic strokes increases during the first two days after the onset of daylight saving time.

 

Friday Five – 2/24/17

Quin Bond, CEAS IIILeave a comment

The Friday Five is a set of five links that I have come across this week that pertain to ergonomics, occupational health, safety, human performance, or human factors.  For whatever reason, I found them interesting, but they are provided with minimal or no commentary and are not meant to be endorsement for a given product.

This week’s Friday Five is going to be focused on healthcare providers.

Surgery is a physically demanding task for the surgical team.  Being that surgeons are people too, they come to work with some of the same nagging aches and pains that all of have.  This study by Susan Hallbeck et al. looked at the impact of surgeons taking small breaks to stretch and exercise during surgeries longer than 2.5 hours or more than 4 hours of cumulative surgery during an op day.  Participating surgeons noted a significant reduction in shoulder pain and felt that the microbreaks were not distracting to surgical performance.

In relation to the above mentioned paper, researchers in Italy looked at the postures and positions related to surgical performance.  For those in the realm of ergonomics, it is no surprise that the ability to control the height of the surgical table reduces the risk of musculoskeletal complaints.

Researchers looked at the human factors involved in performance of nursing tasks and developed a methodology that increased direct patient contact time which resulted in a reduction in missing medicines which caused a decrease in lost time in tracking down medications.  It’s important to look at the way we do things and determine what makes our jobs easier and what tasks take away from being able to perform our primary functions.

The last two papers today involve Neal Wiggerman from Hill-Rom.  The first paper looks at the impact of the placement of brake pedals and hand controls on hospital beds and the required forces to manipulate the bed.

The second paper looks at the impact of powered drive units of bariatric beds for pushing, pulling, maneuvering into elevators, controlling ramp descents, and stopping when compared to non-powered bariatric beds.  The powered units demonstrate significant impacts across the spectrum.   It was nice to see the inclusion of controlling the descent on ramps.  We have performed on-site measurements in several hospitals and this is an area that is often forgotten as many hospitals don’t have significant ramps.  However, when we were measuring demands for patient transporters at a hospital in Philadelphia, the hospital was comprised of several buildings purchased at different times on a hilly property.  As the hospital acquired the buildings, connecting ramps were built as none of the buildings had floors at corresponding heights.  Due to the ramps, pushing and pulling forces in this hospital had a 25% greater requirement than in similar hospitals with no intra-floor ramps.

 

 

 

 

Friday Five – 2/2/17

Quin Bond, CEAS IIILeave a comment

The Friday Five is a set of five links that I have come across this week that pertain to ergonomics, occupational health, safety, human performance, or human factors.  For whatever reason, I found them interesting, but they are provided with minimal or no commentary and are not meant to be endorsement for a given product.

A lot of money and time has been put into exoskeletons for assisting soldiers, laborers, and individuals who have had strokes or spinal cord injuries.  This is an area that I plan on revisiting in future posts.  For now, a company called suitX has introduced a modular line of exoskeletons for assisting with specific work related tasks and body parts.

Whenever there is a change of administrations, regardless of whether there is a change in party, there are revisions to previous rules and regulations.  This National Law Review piece takes a quick look at areas of potential changes at OSHA.

Becker’s Healthcare Review has five great tips for designing an intergenerational workspace in hospital settings.

Not so much ergonomics but a question of productivity and efficiency on the Monday after the Super Bowl.  Kraft Foods is suggesting the day after should be a holiday  with an anticipated 16.5 million workers may call out sick to recover from festivities the day before.  This is an interesting question when talking about presenteeism vs. absenteeism.  How much work is actually lost with people discussing the game and the commercials when they come to work the next day?

When I was taking a tour of our local police department with my son’s Cub Scout den, my son asked the officer who gave the tour about a poster in the squad room.  The poster had a police cruiser that had been in an accident and had a slogan reminding officers that car accidents cause more line of duty deaths than some of the other more media noticed causes.  I found this article with 5 real world tips that police officers can use to make their vehicle safer for today’s tour of duty.