NIOSH Healthcare and Social Assistance Expert Panel Report

Details

• Corporate Authors:
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
• Description:
  The NIOSH Healthcare and Social Assistance (HCSA) Program addresses occupational safety and health issues affecting over 21 million workers. Industries covered by the HCSA program include healthcare industries (ambulatory healthcare services, hospitals, and nursing and residential care facilities) and social assistance. Also, because of the many parallels between human healthcare and animal healthcare, the HCSA Program covers two veterinary medicine/animal care (VM/AC) industries (veterinary services and pet care) and addresses VM/AC issues in other industries that employ laboratory animal care workers such as zoos and botanical gardens, academic institutions, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, and others. NIOSH convened an expert panel in 2017 to review the relevance and impact of NIOSH work conducted specifically in the human healthcare component of HCSA Program during the second decade of the National Occupational Research Agenda (NORA; between 2006 and 2016). The review did not include social assistance, which shares many issues with healthcare since the Program addressed this area less intensively; the review also did not include veterinary medicine/animal care, since the Program started addressing this area fairly late in the decade. Because an important focus of the panel's review was evaluating past efforts conducted during the second decade of NORA, its retrospective review was organized according to four of the second decade priority areas (Safe and Healthy Workplaces; Musculoskeletal Disorders and Patient Mobilization; Hazardous Drugs and Chemicals; and Infectious Disease and Sharps). The HCSA Program greatly appreciates the panel's review. It commended NIOSH for the level of expertise of its researchers and found that its priority areas of work were appropriately focused and highly relevant. The panel noted that "activities were solidly justified based on cited evidence" and noted a number of major contributions and accomplishments of the program. As a result, the panel assigned the HCSA Program a relevance score of 4.5 on a 5 point scale. The panel noted that outputs produced from NIOSH's research program activities are "likely to result in improvement in worker safety and health." However, the panel recommended that the HCSA Program "closely link their important work to actual reductions in illness and injury" noting that proxies "such as education material and research article downloads, knowledge and satisfaction surveys, and environmental design recommendations, while appropriate and useful, may not always translate into harm reduction." In view of this, the panel assigned the HCSA Program an impact score of 3.5 on a 5 point scale, resulting in an overall score of 8.0 on a 10 point scale. The panel made recommendations for consideration for future work of the HCSA Program in the healthcare industries. The panel outlined several broad themes that crossed specific areas of work. These included the difficulty in documenting the impact of NIOSH products such as research and educational and training materials on reduction of injuries and illnesses among workers. In assessing its research impact, NIOSH emphasizes using "intermediate outcomes" which are measures of uptake of its work by a variety of stakeholders to assess research impact. The panel urged NIOSH to take these measurements further - to measure uptake and use of products, to measure behavior and culture change in response to use of NIOSH products, to document specific links between NIOSH products and policy changes, and to assess the impact of NIOSH efforts on reductions in illness and injury. The panel recommended that NIOSH engage in more intervention effectiveness research to address these issues. The panel also suggested a number of specific topics for research. This Response to the HCSA Expert Review Panel's Report addresses how the panel's recommendations will inform the plans of the program going forward. It provides an overview of the HCSA Program's goals within NIOSH's 2019-2023 strategic plan (which are shown in Appendix 1 and address all parts of the HCSA Program including the social assistance and VM/AC industries) and details how NIOSH's HCSA Program will integrate the Panel's recommendations into the strategic plan.
• Subjects:
  Accidents, Occupational Occupational Health Paint Preceptorship Safety
• Keywords:
  Healthcare And Social Assistance Sector Research Program Health Care Workers National Occupational Research Agenda NORA Review Process Worker Health
• Publisher:
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
• Document Type:
  Text
• Funding:
  Contract
• Genre:
  Other
• Place as Subject:
  Georgia ; OSHA Region 4
• CIO:
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)
• Topic:
  Workplace Safety & Health
• Location:
  North America
• Pages in Document:
  1-18
• NIOSHTIC Number:
  nn:20057137
• Citation:
  Atlanta, GA: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, contract 200-2016-F-89983, 2018 Nov; :1-18
• Federal Fiscal Year:
  2019
• Peer Reviewed:
  False
• Collection(s):
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:408443a235de6e2d33b7a6e43b89b3f16863152f18192ee1ad5e29c9dcfd79419146e5377abdadf73cd84703f60cc35827321cfc2e80dc920f1aa008b63a6bac
• Download URL:
  https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/181796/cdc_181796_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 308.25 KB ]