Occupational Safety, Quality and Patient Safety
Worker safety
Occupational safety law requires the employer to assess risks, eliminate or reduce them, train staff, provide protective equipment and health surveillance, and record and investigate accidents and occupational diseases. Biological risks deserve special attention: sharps with safety devices, safe disposal, hepatitis B vaccination, and immediate post-exposure management with reporting of every needlestick. Protective equipment is the last line of defence, not the first.
Patient safety
Understand the standard tools: two patient identifiers before procedures, hand hygiene at the five moments, the surgical safety checklist, medication reconciliation, fall and pressure ulcer prevention, isolation precautions and antimicrobial stewardship. Incident reporting systems capture adverse events and near misses; the medical record remains the legal document, and an incident form never replaces it. Serious events call for root cause analysis, which examines systems rather than blaming individuals.
Traps
Reporting a near miss is not an admission of guilt and must be encouraged. Incident reports do not substitute for clinical documentation. Written procedures do not satisfy the law if practice differs. Blaming an individual usually hides the system failure that allowed the error, while genuine recklessness remains individually accountable.
Rule of thumb
Apply the hierarchy of controls in order: eliminate, substitute, engineer, administrate, then protect the person. If a question describes an equipment or design fix, it is almost always the better answer than telling staff to be more careful.