AHA advises OSHA against health care workplace violence standard

AHA advises OSHA against health care workplace violence standard

The American Hospital Association (AHA) states that it supports disseminating research on effective practices to prevent workplace violence in the health care and social assistance sectors rather than adopting and requiring compliance with a one-size-fits-all standard, as proposed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

AHA General Counsel Melinda Reid Hatton responded to OSHA’s request for information on the issue: “We believe that OSHA could do much to support the efforts of hospitals by encouraging and sponsoring continued research that identifies effective best practices for different workplace settings and circumstances and widely disseminating information about these proven effective best practices to the health care field.”

Hatton says this would encourage organizations “to use a more effective, risk-based approach to addressing workplace violence while the establishment of a uniform workplace violence standard for the field guarantees that organizations will use a narrowly focused and thereby less effective compliance strategy in addressing the problem of workplace violence.”

Study: Yale New Haven fights alarm fatigue, reduces nonactionable alarms

The Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation published results of Yale New Haven (Conn.) Hospital’s alarm-reduction program. The hospital formed an alarm management team in 2013 that implemented recommendations from the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses toolkit to combat alarm fatigue.

Prior to putting best practices in place, the hospital observed 23 patients over 17.25 hours and recorded a total of 251 alarms, nearly half of which were nonactionable. Six months after implementing new strategies, the team performed the same study with 26 patients and only recorded 98 total alarms. Read more about this study.

Researchers find new breed of supermolecule removes pharmaceuticals from water

Researchers at the University of Surrey in England have found that a new type of supermolecule, calix[4], actively seeks certain pharmaceuticals and removes them from water. 

Professor Angela Danil de Namor, University of Surrey emeritus professor and leader of the research, and her co-investigator Brendan Howlin, director of postgraduate research, University of Surrey, have been studying the detection and removal of pharmaceuticals in and from water.

“Preliminary extraction data are encouraging as far as the use of this receptor for the selective removal of these drugs from water and the possibility of constructing a calix[4]-based sensing device,” Namor explains. “From here, we can design receptors so that they can bind selectively with pollutants in the water, so the pollutants can be effectively removed. This research will allow us to know exactly what is in the water, and from here it will be tested in industrial water supplies, so there will be cleaner water for everyone. The research also creates the possibility of using these materials for on-site monitoring of water, without having to transport samples to the laboratory.”

Study finds bed bugs building immunity to commonly used insecticides

The Journal of Economic Entomology published a study from researchers at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., who found significantly reduced susceptibility among bed bug populations to chlorfenapyr and bifenthrin — two commonly used insecticides.

Out of the 10 bed bug populations studied, the researchers found that three of them showed resistance against chlorfenapyr, and five showed growing immunity against bifenthrin.