Employee/Staff Safety
SPS continues to prioritize employee/staff safety (ESS). New strategies are in development to achieve progress towards the four goals for the 2022-2024 goal period.
SPS has learned a great detail about reducing serious employee/staff harm in children’s hospitals since its ESS portfolio launched in 2016, and has leveraged that learning to revamp its ESS theory for improvement. At the center of the 2022 revised ESS improvement theory is the notion that reducing serious employee/staff harm requires unwavering support from local executive and senior leadership not only in building and promoting a robust employee safety culture but also in designing hospital systems & structures that prioritize and optimize employee/staff safety.
In 2021, SPS assembled an ESS Executive Task Force, inclusive of SPS children’s hospitals’ executives and board members, ESS subject matter experts, human resource leaders, and industry professionals skilled in organizational culture change. Outputs from this task force were organized into recommended strategies and tactics that the network can endorse to support a culture of intolerance of serious employee/staff harm in children’s hospitals. These recommendations, along with evolving network opportunities to engage executive and senior leaders in employee/staff safety efforts, will remain a cornerstone of SPS’s ESS theory for improvement moving forward.
Under its revised improvement strategy, SPS also aims to increase local employee/staff safety data collection and continue its focus on the network’s top three ESS harm areas:
Patient Behavioral Events
Overexertion
Slips, Trips, and Falls
As the network’s employee/staff safety efforts are still in their testing phases, any recommendations, resources and learning events have not yet been made publicly available.
For network participants only
Patient Behavioral Events
Employee or staff harm that results from a patient behavioral event regardless of patient intention, including physical and emotional/psychological injury.
Overexertion
Employee or staff harm that results from lifting heavy items, bending, reaching overhead, pushing and pulling heavy loads, working in awkward body postures or performing the same or similar tasks repetitively.
Slips, Trips, and Falls
Employee or staff harm that results from a sliding motion where the foot loses traction with the walking surface, a loss of balance when the natural movement of the foot is interfered with momentarily, and/or a sudden, unintentional change in position causing an individual to land at a lower level, on an object, or on the ground or other surface.
