AOHP 2015 National Conference

Topic Overview: In healthcare, employee safety often becomes one of many competing priorities. With this, regulatory compliance measures such as OSHA and Joint Commission standards tend to become benchmarks for success, while accident and injury rates persist to the outdated mantra of "the cost of doing business." However, by utilizing High-Reliability principles to account for the comprehensive and systemic identification, assessment, and control of hazards among environmental conditions and behaviors, components and relations, and managerial oversight to promote reliability of behaviors and validity of metrics, workplace safety can become a matter of continual improvement, and accident and injury reduction can become a reality.

This presentation discusses the differences between a true High-Reliability Organization that requires workplace safety as a pre-requisite to success in any operation (let alone a device to avoid catastrophic failure,) and a culture of baseline, minimal compliance. It discusses High-Reliability concepts, starting with Enterprise Risk Management, illustrates how reliability and validity of data are required through program participation and managerial oversight before any progress can be considered real, and systemically and scientifically delineates a workplace safety program into integrated components that are executable in an organization of any size. Ultimately, true to High-Reliability concepts, these components allow for the positive reinforcement of safe behaviors, maintenance of safe conditions, and the interaction between the two to account for a total culture change.

Objectives:

1. Identify the principles and concepts of a High-Reliability Organization.
2. Discuss the correlation of High-Reliability principles with hazard identification, assessment and control.
3. Define workplace safety program components leading to the implementation of High-Reliability principles.