Abstract
Over 20 years ago, Lipscomb and Rosenstock reviewed the history and progress of preventing occupational disease and injury in health care workers (HCWs; Lipscomb & Rosenstock, 1997). They not only outlined the progress in preventing work-acquired infectious diseases, including tuberculosis and HIV, but also touched on latex allergy, musculoskeletal injuries, poor safety climate, and dangerous work organization factors in the modern hospital. In spite of much progress, the health care and social assistance sector leads in total nonfatal occupational injury illnesses with 548,100 injuries and 34,700 illnesses in 2017, along with the fourth highest injury incident rate of 4.1 per 100 full-time workers (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2018; Figure 1).
Distribution of nonfatal occupational injuries and illnesses by private industry sector, 2017 (U.S. Department of Labor Statistics).
This month’s issue of Workplace Health & Safety (WH&S) is dedicated to occupational health hazards and interventions in the health care industry. The data clearly demonstrate that this industry merits stronger regulations, effective preventive programs, and a more robust occupational health infrastructure. Occupational Health Nurses have been at the forefront of the seminal research and practice to prevent occupational injury and illness in HCWs and continue to address critical gaps in the literature.
The current COVID-19 pandemic threatens the safety of the health care workforce as never before. Scandalous shortages of personal protective equipment have shocked the country, elevating nurses and other HCWs to heroes in the eyes of the public (Mason & Friese, 2020; Pelletier, 2020). Yet, strong occupational health departments with personal protective equipment stockpiles, industrial hygiene expertise, occupational health nursing, and medicine working collaboratively with infectious disease experts appears to be lacking in our nation’s health care systems.
Workplace Health & Safety’s editorial team is pleased to publish this issue dedicated to health and safety issues among HCWs. Related to the current pandemic is a study by Jung and colleagues regarding Korean nurses who took care of Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) patients in 2015, another fatal coronavirus. Their findings provide important clues as to what U.S. health care workers are facing while working in the current, more widespread coronavirus pandemic. The outbreak was much smaller than the current global pandemic, but if we see the extent of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) globally post-COVID-19, it will be another pandemic like affected returning soldiers from conflict zones. A complementary editorial by Murry on Mindfulness Base Stress Reduction (MBSR) endorses this as an effective intervention for reducing occupational stress due to caring for the high volume of very sick COVID-19 patients.
We also bring diverse multidisciplinary articles that represent new ways to communicate information including our new Round Table feature led by Dr. Susan Gallagher, the associate editor for Professional Practice. As part of the Round Table, you will hear from occupational health nurses and other occupational health experts whose specialty practice experience contributes valuable programmatic insights. The Round Table, Bariatric Space, Design, and Technology in this issue highlights the intersection of obesity, musculoskeletal injuries in caregivers, and innovative practitioners driving technological advances. This is complemented by a professional practice article from the endoscopy suite, in which Fetzer reports on the impact of a low-cost, novel intervention to reduce fatigue and pain in nurses caring for obese patients who undergo colonoscopies. Zhang and colleagues take a deeper dive into the examination of injury incurred by HCWs by considering the co-morbidities of musculoskeletal injury and depression, which can have long-term adverse consequences. Their findings bring to light the holistic and important phenomena of work–life balance among HCWs.
Finally, this issue highlights methodological advancements in research in an article by Yuan et al. on multi-level modeling, a sophisticated statistical technique that considers groups or clusters of workers, such as nurses employed in the same work units, in their analyses. This analytical technique increases the precision of estimates by controlling for the factors such as supervisor and co-worker support that may vary by unit, but not by individual. We wrap-up this issue with our most popular Current Topics feature in which Foster-Chang and Balmer provide an informative and succinct update on the new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) tuberculosis screening guidelines for health care personnel.