WORKFORCE WELLBEING & DEVELOPMENT XXXX
How a focus on worker safety and environmental factors can improve patient care
Kathy Gerwig, vice-president of employee safety, health and wellness, and environmental stewardship officer for Kaiser Permanente, the largest managed care organisation in the USA, discusses how healthcare can lead the way on sustainability issues while developing safe environments for patients and the workforce.
T
here is a school of thought that healthcare organisations cannot achieve excellence in
patient care unless their workers operate in a safe environment where there is respect and collaboration.
Kaiser Permanente’s vice-president of employee safety, health and wellness, and environmental stewardship officer, Kathy Gerwig, is a leading advocate of this viewpoint.
Whilst on a trip to the UK, Gerwig spoke to NHE about her new book ‘Greening Health Care’,
which examines the intricacies of
healthcare and environmental health, both in terms of traditional failures and the measures underway to fix them.
As the national leader for employee safety, health and wellness at Kaiser Permanente, Gerwig is responsible for eliminating workplace injuries, promoting healthy lifestyle choices, and reducing health risks for the organisation’s 175,000 employees and 17,000 physicians.
Protecting staff
Few people realise the connections between environmental programmes and worker health and injuries, she said (more on keeping staff
68 | national health executive Nov/Dec 14
safe on pages 74 to 79). Kaiser Permanente – one of the giants of US healthcare, with revenues of more than $53bn a year – has mature systems in place to protect workers from injury.
Gerwig told us: “One example is cleaning chemicals. Harsh chemicals can have asthma triggers and cause respiratory problems, not just for workers but for patients. We reviewed our cleaning chemicals, working closely with partners at Health Care Without Harm, and the result is that we’re now using cleaning chemicals that are appropriate for the settings. So they provide us with the right level of protection against infection and they’re not harmful to workers or patients.”
She called that an example of a shift that was good for the environment, good for patients and good for workers.
“That is a part of our overall workforce wellness and workplace safety activities,” said Gerwig.
“What creates a safe workplace and a safe place for patient care has more to do with the levels of respect within a unit, the levels of recognition for one another and the appropriate use of resources.
“Those three things are the best determinants of a safe environment for workers and we believe you have to have that safe environment to achieve excellence in patient care.”
She added that upstream thinking and taking a holistic view is needed to ensure worker safety and patient care are delivered effectively.
“We really think the holistic view goes a lot deeper than saying ‘do people have the right equipment to deal with tasks?’ It is more about ‘are all the reinforcements in the system all the way upstream’, so that we prevent incidents from happening, and it’s not just a reaction – at the end of the line – after an incident has happened,” she said.
“That same philosophy of upstream thinking is at the heart of preventive healthcare and is at the heart of our environmental stewardship.”
This requires embedded practices in
the protocols of care. “Let’s take patient mobilisation, as an example,” she said. “So, a patient after surgery needs to be mobilised as part of their care.
“Clearly, moving a patient depends a lot on their own ability to stand up and walk
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