AHA advises OSHA against workplace violence standard for health care

Supporting and disseminating research on effective practices to prevent workplace violence in the health care and social assistance sectors would do more to advance and promote workplace safety than adopting and requiring compliance with a one-size-fits-all standard, the AHA told the Occupational Safety and Health Administration yesterday in response to a 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,” wrote AHA General Counsel Melinda Reid Hatton. She said 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.”