Hospital Nursing: The Hazards Of The Profession
Michalis 'BIG Mike' Kotzakolios

Defined Tag: Hospital Nursing.

Hospital nursing hazards are always present in a tension-packed and stressful hospital setting, which is why preventive measures were set to avoid these hazards. The hazards usually include an unsafe workplace, fire safety hazard, blood borne pathogen hazard, a contaminated work surface, and even the rights of the nursing employee.

To make hospitals a safer place for hospital nursing professionals, hospital management boards developed a safety and health program. The program includes suggestions for (1) workplace, accident and record analysis, (2) prevention and control of hazard, (3) safety and health training as well as a (4) regular review of the program.

Fire safety hazards may include obstruction in fire exits or unmarked exits, of which a hospital nursing aide, who knows the ins and outs in the hospital, may even be unaware of the emergency exit routes. The hospital manages the hazard by continuously maintaining fire safety equipment, informing the staff of every possible fire exits within the area, and conducting actual fire drills once a year.

Hospital nursing staffs are in continuous exposure to dangerous pathogens. To protect them from risking their health due to work-related activities, strict health and safety guidelines are enforced such as routine vaccination for communicable diseases, thorough and regular hand washing of hands during and after exposure to pathogens and hazardous chemicals and wearing of masks and lab gowns during contact with isolation and reverse isolation patients. Also, all records of hospital employees with continuous exposure to pathogens and hazardous chemicals and drugs are kept archived and continuously updated for future reference.

The nurse’s station is an area where exposure to contamination in cases of spills or sprays of specimen samples or chemicals is unavoidable. Contamination starts whenever the spilt is left unsanitized. Thus, to avoid such incidents, handling of lab samples are always done in a designated area. Likewise, the station must always be checked for sanitation.

Due to the hazards in the nursing profession, the Nursing Board Association passed these work safety guidelines to protect the well-being of nurses and their aides in their respective workplaces. Hospital nursing staffs are also informed of their rights in case of failure by the hospital management to enforce the safety measures.

BIG Mike is a well known author, developer and Adsense expert as well as the owner of Niche Maniacs - a unique Adsense Marketing System designed to build long-term passive income streams from Adsense, Amazon, YPN, Chitika and other PPC services.