We're sorry, but OSHAcademy doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled. Please turn on JavaScript or install a browser that supports Javascript.

774 Safe Patient Handling Program
Skip to main content

Assessment Steps

  1. Examine the overall injury rates and see how they compare to others. Administrators and safety managers can use OSHA's self-assessment checklist to examine your hospital's injury rates and compare them with national averages and high-performing hospitals.
  2. Examine your patient handling injury rates and start to pinpoint areas of concern. Use OSHA's patient handling self-assessment tool to review and reflect on the number, nature, and cost of patient handling injuries in your hospital.
  1. Be proactive. A more forward-looking approach, to be used in combination with reviewing injury and illness records, is to be proactive in identifying potential problems that have gone unnoticed, before they result in injuries. Observations of workplace conditions and work processes, job analyses, workplace surveys, and worker interviews are common proactive methods for identifying problems before they result in injury.

Knowledge Check Choose the best answer for the question.

1-5. To help assess hospital employee injury rates and compare them to national averages, administrators and safety managers can use _____.

  • Hospital inspections and surveys
  • State safety records
  • OSHA's self-assessment checklist
  • Workers' compensation reports