New Safety Management System built to enhance healthcare safety

A redesigned Safety Management System (SMS) is being rolled out to facilities throughout the Cypress Health Region. The new SMS has been built to improve safety for employees and all individuals interacting with the health system.

A Safety Management System is a framework and tool to help organizations meet their legal obligations under Occupational Health and Safety law. Traditionally this has been achieved through a Certificate of Recognition model commonly used in the construction industry. The new SMS aims to evolve the overall safety culture with an end goal of less injuries and greater awareness that all users interacting with the health system have specific safety responsibilities and accountabilities.

“Safety is the top value of our Region and redesigning our Safety Management System is an important step towards the achievement of a culture of safety that protects not only our staff, but also considers every user who interacts with the health system,” commented Jeff Schwan, Director of Occupational Health for the Cypress Health Region.

The redesigned system factors in the safety rights and responsibilities of employees, patients/clients/residents, volunteers and visitors, contractors, students, physicians and medical residents, and vendors/suppliers. The Cypress Health Region is the first health authority in the province to incorporate all users of the health system into its SMS. The effort to develop a comprehensive system was a joint initiative between the Region and the Saskatchewan Association for Safe Workplaces in Saskatchewan (SASHW).

“The foundations of this new system encourage individuals to identify unsafe behaviors while also making well informed safety decisions throughout the day. We know through our incident reporting processes that unfortunately injuries are happening in our facilities on a regular basis and one injury is too many,” added Schwan. “To adopt a true culture of safety we believe that we need to build our SMS around everyone, not just our staff. If our staff aren’t safe we know that our patients won’t be safe either and vice versa.”

The correlation between the safety of healthcare workers and system users has been well documented in recent years. The creation of a SMS built around the safety needs of all individuals is a marked change from traditional safety systems that focus solely on employees.

The Region’s decision to redesign its approach to safety spurs from a mandate by the Saskatchewan Ministry of Health to reduce the number of on-the-job injuries for healthcare workers. Injury rates of healthcare workers continue to be amongst the highest of any industry in Saskatchewan.

Work on redesigning the SMS has been a regional focus for several months and has been broken down into six elements. The first element, management commitment and leadership, was completed at the end of 2016 and produced a series of important documents: safety rules; three rights, responsibilities and accountabilities of all individuals; an updated safety charter; and promotion of the Region’s safety logo. The five documents created for element one were prepared with input from Patient and Family Centred Care representatives, staff, management, members of the Cypress Regional Health Authority board, and SEIU-WEST.

With work completed on the first element the Region is now rolling out the Safety Management System to all of its facilities. Focus has shifted towards elements two, three, and four which include hazard identification and control, training and communications, and inspections. Finally, elements five and six which focus on incident reporting, investigations, and emergency response, will be completed.

For more information on the Cypress Health Region Safety Management System visit www.cypresshealth.ca/sms.