Why Care Providers Must Do More to Protect Their Workforce
Technology can help keep solo care providers or delivery workers safe
By Naz Dossa
The tragic story of Joyce Grayson, who was killed while attending a house call, highlighted the dangers that homecare workers can face. Her death came 11 months after nurse Douglas Brant was fatally shot while conducting a home visit in Washington. Both cases have shown how the health care industry is facing increased aggression from the public daily. For lone workers and caregivers working in the community, the risk of violence and abuse from patients and family members has never been greater.
While deaths are thankfully rare, everyday violence against care workers isn’t. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of non-fatal injuries involving health care workers in the workplace is higher than any other industry—and has been for years. Health care workers are now five times more likely to be physically attacked than any other type of worker on the job and while a certain level of security is provided for workers in health care establishments such as hospitals, the same cannot be said for lone and community workers.
The tragic events of Joyce Grayson and Douglas Brant has renewed calls for better safety measures and new legislation, criminalizing violence towards health care workers under federal law—similar to those protections offered to other industries, such as flight crews and airport workers.
Technology Offers Risk Mitigation
In hospitals, technology provides an extra layer of protection, alongside training and workflow strategies, to mitigate risk. But what more can health care providers do to keep their remote workers safe day to day? Technology is one solution that doesn’t require the security of a bricks and mortar setting, in particular lone worker apps that can be pushed out to any cell phone instantly. Measures such as these not only provide workers with an SOS alarm to call for help in an emergency, but they also automate the ability to check in and out of a visit and, if a remote worker fails to check in or respond in a timely manner, can raise an alert with their location provided as part of a real-time online dashboard.
All employers have a legal and moral duty of care towards their workers and technology is offering the tools to help facilitate this. Simple technology can provide invaluable peace of mind for both workers and employers, including the home health workers walking into a situation blind—entering homes and/or neighborhoods they know little about, or visiting patients in unpredictable situations or with aggressive family members.
A Real-World Example
In addition to providing peace of mind, technology offers wider-reaching benefits. One company already experiencing the upside of improving the safety of employees in more ways than one is Provincial Networking Group Inc (PNGI). With staff working alone in the community with clients with disabilities, PNGI received strong encouragement from WorkSafeBC (the regional agency responsible for workface safety in British Columbia) to improve their process pertaining to staff safety checks. Not only did lone working pose a risk, but should an unexpected event or injury occur to a staff member, in many cases it seemed unlikely the client would be able to call for emergency assistance or directly support that staff member.
While there was a manual check-in process in place, it was via phone and required close proximity to the office. Check-in phone calls risked being overlooked and safety check-ins were rarely recorded properly. The solution was a tech system to help PNGI to automate their processes and record check-ins using GPS location, which offered an ability to request help should an event occur, without alerting the client and potentially escalating the situation further.
The result? Not only do staff now feel more secure and better protected with the new system in place, they also feel that it gives them more freedom to do their job. They no longer feel tethered to the office and can enjoy a wider range of activities with clients for longer time periods, knowing that any missed check-ins will be reported and a location provided. The new system has also proved to be a time saver, eliminating the need for manual calls and enabling employees to work much more efficiently.
Health care workers are now five times more likely to be physically attacked than any other type of worker
Other Benefits
Improving measures of employee safety beyond compliance in this way can demonstrate how much an employer values their workers, and there is a strong argument to suggest that by bolstering feelings of safety, companies could be enhancing employee wellbeing and improving productivity in the process.
A recent study in the United Kingdom discovered that employees who experienced a negative event at work were statistically less satisfied in their job in all areas, from pay and benefits and job security through work-life balance and feeling valued by their employer. This, in turn, negatively impacted staff turnover, with 22% of workers saying that personal safety played a part in them leaving a role.
But while it can be used very effectively to flag a potentially risky situation and provide the means to deal with real-time risk in a safer, more effective manner, technology still can’t prevent all negative situations. More action is needed to overcome threats to personal safety across the board, whether through legislation, employee safety monitoring or local government support.
While meaningful change to legislation can take years to get passed, and many safety solutions remain both costly and challenging to implement at scale, personal safety apps can be seamlessly rolled out and embedded into business as usual to proactively manage personal safety risk.
Naz Dossa is CEO of OkAlone, a Canadian company that provides app-based technology to protect health care workers across North America and is part of the global personal safety technology company Peoplesafe. Dossa began his career in banking and spent most of it in and around the telecommunications and information technology sectors, including a long stretch of his career at global provider Colt Technology Services. Before OK Alone and Peoplesafe, he was U.K. managing director of Brightstar, where he was twice voted into the Mobile Power 50 Rankings. He is chair of the British Security Industry Association’s Lone Worker Section Committee. Visit okaloneworker.com.
