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Worker Safety & Health in the Nursing Home Industry

Scope of the Problem

The nursing home industry is one of America's fastest growing industries. Today nursing homes and personal care facilities employ approximately 1.6 million workers at 21,000 work sites. By the year 2005, industry employment levels will rise to an estimated 2.4 million workers.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 1994 nursing and personal care facilities reported 221,200 nonfatal occupational injuries and illnesses to their personnel. Among U.S. industries with 100,000 or more nonfatal injury or illness cases, nursing homes have the third highest rate--16.8 injuries and illnesses per 100 full-time workers. Only meat products processing (at 26.5) and motor vehicle/equipment manufacturing (at 25.4) have higher incidence rates.

Nursing home workers suffer most injuries (51.2 percent) when handling residents. Fifty-eight percent of their injuries are strains and sprains. While back injuries account for 27 percent of all injuries in the private sector, in nursing homes they account for 42 percent of all injuries. Of the 10 occupations with the largest number of injuries illnesses, nursing aides and orderlies are exceeded only by truck drivers and nonconstruction laborers.

OSHA's Emphasis on Nursing Homes

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is beginning an outreach and enforcement initiative aimed at reducing injuries and illnesses among nursing home workers. This initiative emphasizes taking a comprehensive safety and health program approach to address all safety and health hazards and all causes of injuries and illnesses in the industry.

Seven states, each with more than 500 nursing homes, have been chosen to be part of OSHA's pilot program in the nursing home industry:

          Florida        New York
          Illinois       Ohio, and
          Massachusetts  Pennsylvania             
          Missouri

Outreach

To prepare for this pilot program, OSHA compliance officers have been specifically trained in the characteristics of the nursing home industry, in other regulations that apply to the industry, safety and health programs, the financial benefits of safety and health programs, and hazard recognition and control, including how to handle residents safely.

In September, OSHA will offer free training and education seminars to nursing home industry representatives in each of the seven targeted states. The training will key, among other things, on:

Additionally, small nursing home employers can take advantage of OSHA's free consultation services, available in every state. Trained experts can help employers identify and correct specific hazards and implement comprehensive safety and health programs. This service is provided to employers with the assurance that their names and any information about their firms will not be routinely reported to OSHA.

Enforcement

OSHA will use a common-sense approach for enforcement in the nursing home industry. The agency will target work sites with the greatest documented safety and health problems and will use tools such as the phone/fax method for handling safety and health complaints.

Safety Pays Off in Nursing Homes

Many nursing home employers already have learned that working safely is good way to not only help protect their employees, but also affect the bottom line. When one nursing home employer in implemented a program to address safe resident handling, his worker's compensation premium dropped from $750,000 to $184,000. A similar resident handling program at another nursing home in led to a striking reduction in lost workdays --from 2,200 in 1993 to only 31 in 1996.

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