AHA Issue Brief: Building a Safe Workplace and Community — Violence Mitigation in a Culture of Safety

The American Hospital Association’s Hospitals Against Violence (HAV) initiative hosted the American Society for Health Care Risk Management (ASHRM) for a facilitated dialogue to explore challenges and current strategies to mitigate the risk of violence. The discussion fostered an exchange of ideas and solutions that informed this issue brief and accompanying case studies.

From AHA:

In 2021, HAV developed the Building a Safe Workplace and Community framework to guide health care leaders in their efforts to prevent and mitigate violence.

This issue brief, the third of four in the series, examines how hospitals’ violence mitigation efforts can fit effectively into an organization’s culture of safety strategy. The brief includes thought-provoking questions to facilitate discussion of how violence mitigation can be integrated seamlessly into the larger framework of patient and worker safety initiatives, supporting an overall culture of safety. It also explores strategies that leaders could take to best support a culture that mitigates violence as part of larger enterprise efforts.

View the issue brief here.

AHA Issue Brief: Building a Safe Workplace and Community — Providing Trauma Support to Your Workforce Following an Incident or Threat of Violence

The American Hospital Association’s Hospitals Against Violence (HAV) initiative hosted the American Society for Health Care Risk Management (ASHRM) for a facilitated dialogue to explore challenges and current strategies to mitigate the risk of violence. The discussion fostered an exchange of ideas and solutions that informed this issue brief and accompanying case studies.

From AHA:

In 2021, HAV developed the Building a Safe Workplace and Community framework to guide health care leaders in their efforts to prevent and mitigate violence.

This issue brief examines trauma support for hospital and health system team members. It was developed from discussions the HAV Advisory Group had with the Medical University of South Carolina’s National Mass Violence Victimization Resource Center (NMVVRC) team about the challenges and opportunities to provide trauma support to health care workers following an incident or threat of violence.

View the issue brief here.

AHA Building a Safe Workplace and Community: A Framework for Hospital and Health System Leadership

The American Hospital Association’s Hospitals Against Violence (HAV) initiative hosted the American SAHA’s Hospitals Against Violence framework helps guide hospital and health system leadership address the issues of violence in their workplaces, with an emphasis on educating and protecting the workforce. In this effort, we must acknowledge that community violence encroaches into the health care setting, and our workforce is part of the community.

Leadership should push for greater data collection, collective accountability, and ongoing education and training. With this approach, we can achieve the four pillars necessary for implementing a comprehensive violence mitigation strategy: trauma support, violence intervention, culture of safety and mitigating risk.

To learn more about the AHA’s Hospitals Against Violence
initiative, visit www.aha.org/HAV.

Download a PDF of the framework here.

AHA Issue Brief: Building a Safe Workplace and Community — Mitigating Risk of Violence

The American Hospital Association’s Hospitals Against Violence (HAV) initiative hosted the American Society for Health Care Risk Management (ASHRM) for a facilitated dialogue to explore challenges and current strategies to mitigate the risk of violence. The discussion fostered an exchange of ideas and solutions that informed this issue brief and accompanying case studies.

From AHA:

In 2021, HAV developed the Building a Safe Workplace and Community framework to guide health care leaders in their efforts to prevent and mitigate violence.

This issue brief examines risk mitigation and marks the first in a series that expand on each domain of the framework: culture of safety, violence intervention, trauma support and risk mitigation. This issue brief is an outgrowth of a series of discussions between hospital and risk management leaders. The brief shares considerations when assessing potential risks, strategies to mitigating violence and insights on making the care environment safer.

View the issue brief here.

American Society for Healthcare Risk Management, Workplace Violence Toolkit

Violence in the workplace continues to be an area that risk managers need to be proactively preparing their institutions to prevent. At the same time, the risk manager needs to know what to do in the event they are faced with an immediate situation. This tool kit is designed to assist in both of these areas.

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The Joint Commission, Improving Patient & Worker Safety: Opportunities for Synergy, Collaboration, & Innovation

This monograph is intended to stimulate greater awareness of the potential synergies between patient and worker health and safety activities. Using actual case studies, it describes a range of topic areas and settings in which opportunities exist to improve patient safety and worker health and safety activities.

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OSHA, Safety and Health Management Systems: A Road Map for Hospitals

A safety and health management system is a tool to help turn this situation around: a proven, flexible approach to proactively and continually address workplace safety and health issues.1 It provides the overarching framework for planning, implementing, evaluating, and improving all workplace safety and health management efforts.

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OSHA, Safe Patient Handling Programs: Effectiveness & Cost Savings

The Safe Patient Handling Programs: Effectiveness and Cost Savings document gives administrators a business case for investing in safe patient handling programs, policies, and equipment, based on real-life findings from hospitals across the United States that have successfully implemented these programs.

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Association of Occupational Health Professionals in Healthcare Alliance

Beyond Getting Started: A Resource Guide for Implementing a Safe Patient Handling Program in the Acute Care Setting
This resource guide addresses patient handling with the goal of providing the necessary tools for the occupational health professional (OHP) to implement a safe patient handling program. There is a great deal of emerging information, and this resource guide contributes toward the consolidation of that information.

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Occupational Health Surveillance Program, Massachusetts Department of Public Health

Moving into the Future: Promoting safe patient handling for worker and patient safety in Massachusetts hospitals

The risks of injury to health care workers associated with the manual handling of patients are widely recognized. Findings from the survey of Massachusetts hospitals included in this report indicate that most Massachusetts hospitals have already taken steps to improve patient handling practices to protect workers and patients, but that more remains to be done.

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