5 steps to improve health worker safety and patient safety

Establish synergies between health worker safety and patient safety policies and strategies:

• Develop linkages between occupational health and safety, patient safety, quality improvement, and infection prevention and control programmes.
• Include health and safety skills in personal and patient safety into education and training programmes for health workers at all levels.
• Incorporate requirements for health worker and patient safety in health care licensing and accreditation standards.
• Integrate staff safety and patient safety incident reporting and learning systems.
• Develop integrated metrics of patient safety, health worker safety and quality of care indicators, and integrate with health information system.  

Develop and implement national programmes for occupational health and safety of health workers:

• Develop and implement national programmes for occupational health for health workers in line with national occupational health and safety policies.
• Review and upgrade, where necessary, national regulations and laws for occupational health and safety to ensure that all health workers have regulatory protection of their health and safety at work.
• Appoint responsible officers with authority for occupational health and safety for health workers at both the national and facility levels.
• Develop standards, guidelines, and codes of practice on occupational health and safety.
• Strengthen intersectoral collaboration on health worker and patient safety, with appropriate worker and management representation, including gender, diversity and all occupational groups.

Protect health workers from violence in the workplace

• Adopt and implement in accordance with national law, relevant policies and mechanisms to prevent and eliminate violence in the health sector.
• Promote a culture of zero tolerance to violence against health workers
• Review labour laws and other legislation, and where appropriate the introduction of specific legislation, to prevent violence against health workers.
• Ensure that policies and regulations are implemented effectively to prevent violence and protect health workers.
• Establish relevant implementation mechanisms, such ombudspersons and helplines to enable free and confidential reporting and support for any health worker facing violence.