Fall Prevention for Healthcare Workers
Work-related slip, trip, and fall incidents can frequently result in serious disabling injuries that impact a healthcare employee’s ability to do his or her job, often resulting in lost workdays, reduced productivity, and diminished ability to care for patients.
The American institute for occupational health and safety released a workbook that identifies the top 10 slip, trip and fall hazards specific to healthcare facilities.
For each hazard this workbook explains how the hazard contributes to slips trips and falls, where the hazard is likely to occur, and provides recommendations to reduce or eliminate the hazard.
A key point is to keep floors dry and clean:
- Encourage workers to cover, clean, or report spills promptly
- Provide walk-off mats, paper towel holders, trash cans, and umbrella baggers near entrances to minimize wet floors
- Hang or place spill pads, paper towel holders and pop-up-tent wet floor signs in convenient locations throughout the healthcare facility so employees have easy access to products to clean, cover, and highlight a spill.
- Advertise phone/pager numbers for housekeeping through emails, posters, and general awareness campaigns.
