As Nigeria joined the rest of the world to mark World Patient Safety Day 2020, health workers have advocated safety at the design stage of all healthcare facilities.
They observed that poor infrastructural design in most healthcare facilities posed levels of risk to healthcare workers.
They noted that some multiple floors facilities had neither elevators nor ramps, and workers were expected to lift patients or in some instances, support patients walking through the stairs, which could lead to slips, trips, and falls, leaving both healthcare workers and patients with bodily harm.
Already, the Bureau for Labour Statistics in 2007 stated that slips, trips, and falls were the second most common causes of injuries in hospitals, where incident rates for healthcare workers are 90 per cent greater than the average for all private industries.
At this year’s celebration in Abuja, recently, Ambassador, Patient Safety Movement Foundation, Ehi Iden, who spoke on, “Healthcare Workers Safety: A Priority for Patient Safety,” appealed to employers of labour within the healthcare sector, the government, and regulatory agencies to look closely into the issues of healthcare workers’ safety and protection.
Noting that the work environment was highly infectious, he said what was needed was mitigation in form of safe process designs, improved hygiene practices, use of personal protective equipment, and vaccination of healthcare workers against infectious diseases with existing vaccines.
Stressing that this year’s theme could not have come at a better time, Iden argued that in most cases, healthcare employers never braced up to their responsibilities in this regard.
He said: “So obvious is the absence of duty of care from the employers. If you recall the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014, over 378 healthcare workers were infected, while 196 healthcare workers’ deaths were recorded. When you again juxtapose that with the report from the World Health Organisation (WHO), in July 2020, over 10,000 healthcare workers have been infected in Africa by COVID-19. That report also mentioned that only 16 per cent of the 30,000 facilities surveyed had assessment scores of up to 75 per cent. This further explains how vulnerable healthcare workers are to infectious risks in their workplaces, and the need to fix this system towards improving the rate of patient safety and treatment outcomes.
