LMP Concepts

For at least one Colorado facility, workplace safety started with awareness. And building awareness was a team effort.

Wheatridge Medical Office, with about 140 employees, had three workplace injuries in the first half of 2013. The Wheatridge Safety team, representing departments across the facility, agreed that was unacceptable. But team members weren’t sure where to start, and the team lacked a management representative, making it hard to find time or resources to implement ideas.

That changed when Jeanne Kraft, RN, nurse manager for Internal Medicine, joined the safety team. The team adopted two ideas that had worked elsewhere. One was to host a safety fair, following a tried-and-true format: People visited several booths where they got information and answers to a quiz on basic safety practices. Everyone who completed the quiz then got a ticket for a barbecue lunch on the patio.

It’s one thing to identify effective practices in an issue as important as workplace safety. It’s another to educate and engage teams in adopting a consistent set of practices across a region.

The Northwest’s Employee Health and Safety Department has done just that—and earned program-wide recognition for its approach.

In November 2012, the department’s Labor Management Partnership Workplace Safety team issued a challenge to the region’s 16 facility safety committees. The committees, established to help identify and resolve safety issues at the facility level, often differed in their approach and results. The safety challenge provided a fun way for the local committees to get to know more employees in their facilities, follow a consistent protocol and improve safety.

Challenging teams to step up

“The Safety Awareness Challenge provides safety committees an opportunity to work together with their labor, management and Permanente partners to effect real change around workplace safety,” says Chris Mozingo, RN, workplace safety labor consultant for the NW Region.

The yearlong campaign challenged each facility to:

• submit monthly or quarterly safety meeting minutes, to help keep their work on track
• have physicians and dentists attend at least 80 percent of their facility’s safety meetings, to ensure widespread participation and leadership (nonclinical departments were asked to send representatives to each meeting)
• promote safety conversations (a blame-free approach for observing work practices) and ensure at least 25 percent of employees are trained to lead such conversations
• adopt and promote safety awareness plans to help teams identify and correct at least three different workplace hazards (for instance, trips and falls or sprains and strains)
• host a safety fair, safety barbeque or other facility event within the year

“The Safety Committee Challenge goes beyond recognizing achievement. It fosters and reinforces the relations between Regional Safety, management and frontline staff,” says Employee Health and Services Safety Specialist II Brian Cekoric.

Getting results, recognition

Nine facilities completed the safety challenge by meeting each of the five established criteria. These efforts helped the Northwest region—already a leader in some key measures of workplace safety—record a 4 percent decrease in injury rates compared with the previous year. Teams that met the challenge will receive additional funding to support safety awareness promotions in their facilities.

For its part, the Northwest Employee Health and Safety team won the 2013 National Workplace Safety Award for its work in engaging frontline teams.

“The simple focus on injury prevention and raising awareness goes a long way to changing the culture of safety,” says Rob Weiking, Employee Heath and Services program manager.

Leonard Hayes, manager of Environmental Services culture and training in the Northwest, oversees workplace safety for 125 outpatient EVS workers in five service areas. This includes the East Side service area, whose EVS unit he directly supervises and which has recorded no injuries for nearly five years. In February 2014, Hayes won the National Workplace Safety Individual Award. He spoke recently with Jennifer Gladwell, LMP communications consultant, about how he engages teams to work more safely.

Q. You and your department have achieved a great turnaround in workplace safety. How did you do it?

A. You have to give people information and recognition. Workplace safety is a standing item on our UBT agendas. We talk about working safely, acknowledge how well our teams do and tell them “thank you.” I’ve been put in this job to take away the myths that injuries are inevitable, so people can go home at the end of their shift and enjoy their time outside of KP.

Q. What do you do personally to engage your staff on safety?

A. I’m in there with them physically.  I’ve been a worker and I take interest in what the teams are doing. I try to make sure people know I care for them by being available to them and making sure they have the tools to do their job. I am committed to responding to issues as quickly as possible and resolving them. I have a great labor partner and co-lead, Sherri Pang. She’s been my anchor with the campus and the (East Side) team. She helps me a lot by sending emails, creating fliers, understanding and encouraging the team.