Program Evaluation
By establishing evaluation procedures and a process for enhancing your safe patient handling program, you can periodically assess the effectiveness of your hospital's efforts and ensure continuous safe patient handling improvement and long-term success.
Evaluation Steps
A few evaluation steps to consider:
- Set goals that include worker safety. Most hospitals already have safety goals, but the safe patient handling leaders include worker safety in their goals and measure whether they are meeting them.
- Track the success of your program. Examine the number and type of patient handling injuries, the root causes that led to these injuries, the number of lost work or modified duty days, and more types of program measures. You can also assess the efficacy of your safe patient handling policies. These data can also help you identify opportunities for improvement.
- Analyze lagging and leading indicators. Lagging indicators are looking in the rear-view mirror to see what happened over a previous period of time. Leading indicators are forward-looking predictive results. If a program is designed well and implemented effectively, improvements in leading indicators should predict improvement in lagging indicators next time they are checked.
- Lagging indicators include: staff turnover rates and staff lost-time and injury rates related to SPH.
- Leading indicators include: Peer leaders per unit and SPH handling devices available per patient.
- Share results with your employees. Sharing safety trend data creates motivation and instills pride (and competition) among units to achieve success.
- Gather feedback from staff who handle patients. Realize that every program will need adjustments after being put into practice. Even small changes can improve the use of equipment and worker engagement tremendously.
Knowledge Check Choose the best answer for the question.
4-1. If a SPH program is designed well and implemented effectively, improvements in leading indicators _____.
- should predict future improvement in lagging indicators
- will result in fewer equipment costs per unit
- do not mean lagging indicators will improve
- can fool evaluators into thinking the program is effective
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