Injury reports in pharmacies suggest extra caution during peak flu vaccination months

Posted on December 18, 2012 by Alison Grenkie

A recent NIOSH study examined the reported incidence of needlestick injuries at a US nationwide pharmacy chain and revealed a few valuable conclusions. From 2000 to 2011 there were 33 needlestick injuries reported by 31 different pharmacy locations. Of these 33 injuries, 24 (73%) occurred from September through January, the period during which flu vaccinations are commonly administered.

Overall incidence of needlestick injuries was low, with annual incidence of needlestick injuries at these pharmacies ranging from 0 to 3.62 per 100,000 vaccinations. Injuries were most likely to occur after needle use and before disposal (58% of reported incidents). Additionally, researchers warned that needlestick injuries are often underreported.

The researchers believe that many if not all of the needlestick injuries they reviewed were likely preventable. Their recommendations included better tracking of injuries and following needlestick prevention guidelines. Vaccination providers can hopefully learn from the observations made in this study and develop necessary safety precautions during this flu vaccination season.

At Intelex, we believe that knowing when an injury is most likely to occur is an excellent step towards preventing it. Reporting on workplace injuries is a good starting point, but the data collected should be used to encourage continuous improvement in corporate safety practices.

The study appeared in November’s issue of Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology.

Are you leading…or lagging? Revolutionizing safety performance in Oil and Gas

Posted on August 15, 2012 by Paul Leavoy

Editor’s note: This webinar is now available On Demand. Watch it anytime.

So, you’re tracking safety performance. Great. What metrics are you tracking? Are you measuring the right elements of your safety program? What are your metrics telling you? In short: are you leading, or lagging?

If you can’t answer these questions, join us for Leading and Lagging Indicators: Revolutionizing Safety Performance in Oil & Gas. Geared towards leaders in the oil and gas sector but applicable to any business that has to deal with recording, managing and tracking workplace incidents, accidents, near-misses, environmental impacts and more on a regular basis, this free 30-minute webinar explores how reimagining your approach to environment, health and safety (EHS) metrics can revolutionize organizational performance, minimize costs and curtail risk. It is slated to begin at 3 p.m. EST on Wednesday, August 15.

In the presentation, Intelex oil and gas solution specialists Stephen Buffett and Gurpreet Lalwani will explore how to leverage leading and lagging indicators to improve overall organizational safety performance, gain greater insight into understand your indicators and what they mean for your organization, and the role of tools in converting lagging into leading indicators.

“Behind every fatality, behind every recordable incident, there’s going to be tons of near-misses, and hundreds if not thousands of at-risk behaviours,” adds Buffett. “By changing the way you track leading and lagging indicators, you can significantly reduce the risk of these business-critical errors ever occurring.”

New Intelex Case Study: BA Blacktop

Posted on July 20, 2012 by Maxim Ivlev

We’re excited to share our recently released case study regarding BA Blacktop’s success with Intelex’s Quality Nonconformance and Standard Safety Incidents applications. With unique objectives to streamline and unify their Quality and Safety management programs to improve tracking and monitoring processes, BA Blacktop turned to Intelex to help them achieve these goals. The end result was remarkable, including a 56% reduction in spills since 2009, noticeable improvements in insurance premiums over the past 3 years, and 18% reduction in motor vehicle accidents since 2009 to name a few.

To learn more on how BA Blacktop utilized Intelex solutions to ensure a strong reputation and driving force towards success in the construction industry, check out the case study today!

Download today!

True competence starts with strategy

Posted on July 12, 2012 by Paul Leavoy

We’ve discussed how training is not competence and how compromised employee competence can hurt all aspects of business performance. So, what do you do about it? Today I’d like to discuss a very simple approach to developing effective training and cultivating workplace competence.

While a high level of employee competence makes the difference between a simply serviceable workforce and one that truly excels, many might contest that achieving competence is easier said than done. This is true; properly training staff can be a significant burden on any organization. Simply providing training, tracking training, and measuring competence post-training involves substantial costs, multiple dedicated, full-time trainers, depending on the organization’s size – burdens that are significantly reduced if not entirely eliminated for organizations that use the right training tracking and management software. Coupling these software tools with a training strategy will generate results for any organization of any size, under any budgetary constraints.

To that end, here are some essential tips for improving your workplace trainign programs and enhancing employee competence.

Start with a training strategy. Conduct a basic needs assessment to define what the requirements are for all employee groups and determine resource and content availability so you know who is available to provide training and what materials exist or need to be created. The results of these investigations will inform your implementation strategy. Plan to leverage training management software to execute your strategy, and ensure it is scalable software that can accompany corporate growth.
Evaluate your time constraints and resources. Do you need an employee up and running as soon as possible, or can your training resources take time to train the individual and gradually integrate him or her into the workforce? If you don’t want to hire and maintain a team of trainers to implement your training plan and conduct training and competency exercises as your organization grows, use a training software tool. Yes, training and competency-building is a significant investment, but it cannot be reiterated enough how time-consuming and resource-heavy thorough training can be without streamlined software. Even the simple act of tracking training manually – that is, without a training tracking tool – will eat up unnecessary resources on a daily basis and grind your training program down to a lumbering pace.
Define goals and track progress. While this may be one of the most crucial aspects in a successful training strategy, it is also one of the most overlooked. Business leaders often think that training is nebulous and too difficult to track, and this factor might be the greatest contributor to the gulf between training and competence described above. Yet it is quite simple to track the success of a training strategy.
Get a training software solution that can capture and streamline key performance indicators (KPI), such as dates and times for training, instructors, cost per delivery, attendance, and accountability. It is also ideal to have functionality to automatically assign courses (e.g. Brian is hired in the manufacturing department and automatically assigned a group of required courses), reminders and escalations, generate reports, and produce detailed analytics on training performance.
Build custom quizzes. Critically, you’ll want the capacity to generate customized quizzes to test employees on course content to ensure they have actually absorbed required information. This step is generally overlooked, yet is one of the most crucial aspects of building competency as opposed to having employees simply ‘sit in a classroom’. Notably, possessing all of these documented metrics will help you circumvent potential legal calamities by enabling you to easily prove all employees were thoroughly trained.
Calculate ROI and get buy-in. An underlying component to a successful training strategy is buy-in, and not just from senior management and those that hold the purse strings, but across the entire organization. As you prepare your training strategy, create case studies, define scenarios that illustrate the consequences of compromised training – as well as the costs, time and resources associated with a manual training management system as opposed to a software-based system – and calculate training ROI to build a convincing case for a streamlined, competency-focused training strategy.

Do you have ideas on how to better ensure training programs improve workforce competency? Write me or post your ideas in the comments section below.

Want to learn more about building effective training programs and generating true competency among your workforce? Check our white paper, Cultivating Competence: Leveraging Training Tools for Measurable Results.

Is your trained employee competent?

Posted on July 10, 2012 by Paul Leavoy

It happens all the time. A worker makes a misstep in his or her day-to-day duties. The mistake leads to a serious injury, compromised product quality, negative environmental impacts, or even a fatality. “But they were trained,” the supervisor responsible for the employee in question objects. Trained, indeed – but were they competent in their job?

This situation is a regular occurrence in workplaces around the world and it speaks to a widespread and persistent discrepancy in many conventional approaches to training management: the gulf between simply delivering training and ensuring actual competency. Organizations that have achieved success know the value of a comprehensive, robust training program. Streamlined onboarding of new employees and ongoing training – and, critically, training tracking – throughout the course of their professional development can, if delivered effectively, lead to a more effective and responsible workforce, and greater retention rates. After all, while the costs associated with recruiting, training, support and professional development can be great, any seasoned business owner knows it is even more expensive to lose those employees.

A widespread problem, however, is that too often employers equate training with competency. They assume that since an employee has sat in a classroom and completed a course, that they are competent – a very inaccurate presumption. The following misconceptions contribute to some traditional views on corporate training:

Any and all training is good training, so we ought to train for the sake of training.
Simply having employees sit in a classroom means they are competent.
The availability of training material is sufficient enough to induce learning.
Subject-matter experts (SME) are able to train other staff based on tenure (that is, the notion that longer-serving employees are more capable of delivering training).
That robust training is not necessarily worth the investment and ROI is too difficult to capture.

As with the mistaken belief that training is tantamount to competence, all these assumptions lead to false conclusions. But above and beyond how these misconceptions are engendered it is important to clarify what is actually meant by competence in an organizational context. Essentially, ‘competence’ refers to an employee’s ability to do their job properly. But establishing competency within an organization is not something that just happens, nor is it something that will be necessarily produced by the provision of an otherwise robust and seemingly comprehensive training program. Instead, a systematic approach featuring a nuanced training strategy is an essential prerequisite for employee competence.

Competency certainly sounds like something that would be an advantageous element to cultivate within a corporate culture, if not an essential element of doing business. However, the intrinsic value of a training program that engenders competency is not always immediately apparent to upper management whose buy-in is critical to the success of any training strategy.

Tomorrow we’ll discuss how training impacts different areas of business performance, and on Thursday we’ll talk Training and Competency Strategy.

Yes, even tourism and hospitality businesses benefit from streamlined environmental management

Posted on June 7, 2012 by Paul Leavoy

Monitoring environmental impacts by tracking sustainability KPIs is essential for any business in the hospitality industry. But, from a financial perspective, how these environmental metrics are tracked is as important as the fact they are tracked. Results increasingly show a software-based EMS is the most effective way of improving environmental performance and boosting revenue.

Environmental management has been overcomplicated in recent years, and business leaders often feel overwhelmed by the perceived array of complex requirements associated with environmental performance. But it is actually quite simple. On a rudimentary level, it involves tracking and reporting on four critical metrics: waste and wastewater output, water usage, and air emissions. After analyzing these factors, a resort can develop and implement new policies to mitigate its environmental impacts and save money.

But the most substantial savings of environment management arises from the implementation of a software-based EMS. The return on investment (ROI) from a system that tracks, analyzes and reports on all of the metrics associated with your environment program can be enormous, and manifests in a number of ways:

Efficiency: As with Grand Teton, in many resorts, environment management personnel commit a substantial amount of time and effort to basic tasks, including the collection, assessment and reporting of environmental data. These are all elements of an environment program that can be streamlined through software. For example, consider all the time an environment manager or full-time equivalent spends manually inputting data into a traditional spreadsheet program, assessing the data and generating reports based on the data. The right software will allow staff across all locations to input the four critical environmental metrics into a web-based platform and automate the processes of assessing and collecting data.
Risk Avoidance: Often resorts face substantial fines from permit violations as a result of poor management of wastewater output and air emissions. A robust software-based EMS is capable or correlating real-time emissions and wastewater statistics to permit thresholds and issuing automatic email notifications to warn environment management personnel that a permit violation is likely or imminent. This allows a resort to proactively manage emissions sources and discharge points to ensure permitted tolerances are not exceeded and costly fines are avoided.
Brand Image: As the world becomes more environment-conscious, the value of a legitimate green, environmentally progressive brand image is substantial. But the perception of a progressive environmental agenda is only as effective as the environment program supporting it. A software-based EMS will curb the amount of time spent on the minutiae of managing an environment program, freeing-up time for environment managers to focus on improving environmental performance by implementing aggressive sustainability policies. Also, real-time access corporate environment KPIs and live reporting capabilities will enable a resort to prove its environmental performance with current data at any point.

A fulsome software solution will also provide cost savings associated with continual audit preparedness, the elimination of duplicate data, and the tracking of (and automatic following-up on) corrective actions. As with companies like Grand Teton Lodge Company, which achieved the goal of implementing a paperless office, results continually show environment management software is the most effective and efficient means of implementing and maintaining a robust EMS as well as ensuring continued compliance with regulatory and legislative standards.

In the heat of the moment

Posted on May 31, 2012 by Maxim Ivlev

‘Water, rest and shade’ are the three key components U.S Secretary of Labor, Hilda L. Solis, will be focusing on promoting to outdoor workers in the upcoming summer of 2012. It’s all part of OSHA’s recently launched national outreach initiative to raise awareness over the dangers of working outside in hot weather.

Every year, heat exhaustion reaches thousands of outdoor workers in industries such as roofing, construction, transportation, utilities, and landscaping, to name a few. While onsite, what employees may initially discover with simple heat rashes and cramps can often result in severe heat stroke or even fatality.

Dr. David Michaels, assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health, says these are workplace hazards that can be easily avoided with simple precautions. “Anyone who works outside is at risk”, adds Michaels, “Drinking plenty of water and taking frequent breaks in cool, shaded areas are incredibly important in the hot summer months.” To add to this awareness, OSHA has developed heat illness educational materials in English and Spanish, as well as a curriculum to be used for workplace training to provide more knowledge to employees who are at risk.

U.S. hospitals realizing it pays to measure quality of care

Posted on April 23, 2012 by Lauren Craig

Ahead of a value-based purchasing initiative to begin for Medicare in 2014 under the federal government’s Affordable Care Act, hospitals across the U.S. should be taking a long, hard look at their quality processes and how they measure their success. Value-based purchasing under the U.S. healthcare reform means Medicare will start paying institutions more for scoring high on a series of measures that indicate patient care, and will pay less to those who do not meet the quality benchmarks.

While quality of health care is important if only to ensure patients receive satisfactory care, a few hospitals in the U.S. who earnestly measure their quality processes are starting to notice an additional benefit to ensuring the utmost care is delivered. One successful case is Detroit’s Henry Ford Health Systems, which launched a quality improvement program in 2008 called the “No Harm Campaign”. The program sought to improve patient care and reduce the amount of patient “harm events” that occurred. In doing so, over a four-year period and across its five hospitals, Henry Ford recently announced it saw $10 million in cost savings by reducing infections, improving procedures and preventing patient and employee injuries.

Tracking ROI of quality programs is relatively new to the healthcare industry. Henry Ford’s chief quality officer, William Conway M.D., admits in Quality News Today that “in most industries, improving quality reduces costs, but was not recognized in healthcare until only recently because insurers and Medicare used to pay hospitals for higher utilization generated by mistakes, errors or bad outcomes.”

Now that the new healthcare law signed under the Obama administration will begin zeroing in on quality of care metrics and directly linking compensation to achievement in this area, it’s expected that the industry will see an increase in the investment hospitals are making towards tracking, measuring and continuously improving the quality of their care.

Thousands of businesses to be affected by OSHA’s proposed recordkeeping rules

Posted on June 22, 2011 by Paul Leavoy

The Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) is planning changes that would affect how businesses track and report on workplace injuries.

The proposed revisions to injury and illness recordkeeping rules would require employers to report work-related fatalities and in-patient hospitalizations within eight hours of occurrence, and all work-related amputations within 24 hours. Reporting amputations is not required under the existing regulation.

Also, the rule would update the section of OSHA’s recordkeeping rule that list industries exempt from injury and illness reporting requirements. Currently, some industries aren’t required to report due to their relatively low injury and illness rates. However, these industries are currently classified under the old Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) system, not the more widely used North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). The proposed rule would update the list to reflect NAICS classification, as well as more current Injury and Illness rates and, as a result, some industries formerly exempt from injury and illness reporting requirements might have to report when the rule is issued, including liquor stores, bakeries, auto parts stores, and more. In fact, OSHA estimates nearly 200,000 establishments will be affected by the changes.

However, these rules are by no means set in stone. The public has until September 20, 2011 to provide feedback. Head to regulations.gov to find the proposed rule and submit comments.

In the meantime, if you are not currently tracking and reporting on injury and illness data electronically, now is the time to start. A streamlined solution will significantly ease the burden of reporting in a timely, accurate and legally compliant manner, and make adjusting to these changes much easier.

First FSMA rules in effect July 3. Are you ready?

Posted on May 6, 2011 by Paul Leavoy

Earlier this week the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced the first set of rules under the landmark Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), legislation signed earlier this year which gives the FDA sweeping powers to prevent food safety disasters.

The two new rules, which take effect July 3, are pretty logical preventive measures that, in all fairness, probably should have been implemented a long time ago. The new rules are as follows:

Order on Administration Detention of Food: The first new rule gives the FDA the authority to hold food products that may be contaminated or mislabeled. Before now, the administration only had the right to detain food when it had sufficient evidence it was mislabeled or contaminated, thereby presenting a threat to humans or animals. Now if the FDA even suspects contamination or mislabeling, it can detain the product.
Rule on Imported Food: Organizations importing food now have to disclose whether another country has rejected or refused the product. With this information, the FDA will be better equipped to target foods that may pose a risk to public health.

The new regulations are the first in what will be an ongoing stream of new rules determining how the FSMA affects organizations across the U.S., but also adds to the Act’s current scope, which includes legislative components that took affect earlier this year when it was signed into law, including the following:

If the FDA determines a reasonable probability of serious adverse health consequences in any food product, it may demand records of other food products affected in a similar manner.
If the FDA finds a “reasonable probability” food has been misbranded, adulterated, or capable of generating serious adverse health consequences, it may issue a mandatory recall.
Whistleblowers who report violations or testify benefit from increased protection from any form of reprisal.
The FDA has already increased the frequency of inspections and also uses a risk-based model to prioritize inspections.

As more FSMA rules are come down the pipes in the next 12 months, and as the new requirements take effect July 3, it is up to all U.S. Food and Beverage businesses to take action now, by implementing food safety management systems, documenting detailed food safety plans, focusing on companywide hazard identification and risk mitigation (along the lines spelled out in HACCP), and prepare for a higher frequency of inspection.