Health care workers suffer more injuries and illnesses on the job each year
than those in any other industry, but the Occupational Safety and Health Administration
conducts few inspections of health care facilities and is hampered in its
ability to take action to resolve unsafe conditions because of the absence of
needed safety standards, a report by Public Citizen shows.
Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group, recommends that OSHA significantly
increase the number of inspections of the health care industry facilities and
pursue standards to ensure that workers are protected from the risks posed by
musculoskeletal disorders, workplace violence, and other threats. It also recommends that Congress significantly increase OSHA funding.
Nurses, nursing aides, orderlies, and attendants suffer more musculoskeletal
injuries than workers in any other field, according to the report. Costs
associated with back injuries in the health care industry are estimated to be
more than $7 billion annually.
In 2010, health care employers reported 653,900 workplace injuries and illnesses,
about 152,000 more than the next most afflicted industry sector, manufacturing.
The construction industry has the most inspections.
Although health care workers outnumber construction workers more than
two-to-one, OSHA conducts just one-twentieth as many inspections of health care
facilities as construction sites.
In response to questions by Public Citizen for the report, OSHA said that it
doesn’t have the resources necessary to develop certain standards. OSHA’s
responses are included in the report’s appendix.
The agency’s $535 million budget is inadequate to oversee the 7 million job
sites it’s responsible to oversee, said Public Citizen said.
In addition, Public Citizen said in the report that the agency’s rulemaking
efforts have been blocked.
In 2000, the agency published a final standard to protect workers in all
industries from ergonomic stressors. But Congress repealed the rule before it
took effect.
At the beginning of the Obama administration, the agency proposed a rule to
add a column on employers’ incident reporting logs to designate whether
workplace injuries were musculoskeletal disorders. But the administration
delayed the proposed rule, and Congress later blocked it.
The Public Citizen report said OSHA is attempting to partially address the
frequency of injuries among nursing home employees with a “national emphasis
program,” which aims to address ergonomic stressors, bloodborne pathogens,
tuberculosis, workplace violence, and slips, trips and falls.
But the program doesn’t cover hospitals or other health care settings, where
high injury rates also have been reported, according to the report. In the absence
of a standard for ergonomic safety, the agency must rely on its “general duty
clause” to issue citations for unsafe ergonomic conditions. General duty clause
cases require a high evidentiary threshold, and only seven citations regarding
ergonomics have been issued to nursing homes over the past two fiscal years.
