Workplace Hazards to Nurses and Other Healthcare Workers

Workplace Hazards to Nurses and Other Healthcare Workers:

Promising Practices for Prevention

June 7, 8, 2007

Best Western Royal Plaza Hotel & Trade Center (www.rplazahotels.com)

181 Boston Post Road West (Route 20), Marlborough, MA 01752

Faculty - Day One

Craig Slatin Sc.D Craig received his ScD in work environment policy from the University of Massachusetts Lowell in 1999. He is an associate professor in the UMass Lowell Department of Community Health and Sustainability where he teaches community health and health policy courses. He co-directs the Center for Public Health Research and Health Promotion at UMass Lowell. He also is the principal investigator of the PHASE in Healthcare Research Project (Promoting Healthy and Safe Employment) which has studied health disparities among healthcare workers in hospitals and nursing homes. He is the principal investigator of The New England Consortium, a regional hazardous waste worker health and safety training program based at UMass Lowell. Dr. Slatin is on the editorial board of New Solutions, a Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health. He is a long-time member of the Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health (MassCOSH) and an active member of the Massachusetts Teachers Association.

Margaret Quinn ScD, CIH received a BA from Brown University, an M. Sc. in Industrial Hygiene and an M. Sc. in Physiology from Harvard University, School of Public Health and a ScD in Industrial Hygiene from the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

Dr. Quinn is a professor in the Department of Work Environment at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Her research is in the area of occupational and environmental exposure assessment. She is Director of the Sustainable Hospitals Program which works with industry, labor and community groups to identify and implement healthier, safer, and more environmentally-friendly products, processes and work practices in healthcare. She currently heads a NIOSH-funded study called “Project SHARRP” Safe Homecare and Risk Reduction for Providers. Project SHARRP is a collaborative effort of the University of Massachusetts Lowell and the Mass Department of Public Health to evaluate the working conditions of home health care providers, with particular focus on needlesticks, injuries from other sharp medical devices and blood exposures. The Massachusetts Nurses Association is a partner in the study.

Ainat Koren PhD, RN is a registered nurse. She holds a BSN and an MS from Hebrew University in Israel and her PhD is from the University of Massachusetts Lowell in Nursing and Health Promotion. She is an assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell in the Department of Nursing. Ainat was member of the PHASE in Healthcare research team and has participated in developing publications titled Reporting of Occupational Injuries in Healthcare Facilities and The Impact of healthcare restructuring in Massachusetts on the health and safety of healthcare workers.

Laura Punnett ScD is Professor of Epidemiology and Occupational Ergonomics in the Department of Work Environment, University of Massachusetts Lowell. She is also Senior Associate at the UML Center for Women and Work and Director of the new Center for the Promotion of Health in the New England Workplace (CPH-NEW). She has published extensively on the causes and prevention of work-related musculoskeletal disorders in a variety of industries, as well as other health effects of physical workload and psychosocial stress at work. More recently she has become interested in the broader range of health effects that manifest a gradient by gender and socioeconomic status, examining how much of those effects can be explained by how exposures to the physical, psychosocial and organizational conditions of work are distributed by socioeconomic status and differ between women and men. Dr. Punnett has consulted to a number of private companies as well as the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and the World Health Organization.

Carole Pearce, RNC, PhD received her PhD in Nursing from Boston College, MS from Boston University, and BSN from St. Anslem’s College. She is Professor Emerita from the University of Massachusetts Lowell and a women’s health practitioner. Her research focus is on violence in the workplace, violence during pregnancy, violence across the lifespan, and Hispanic pregnant women’s view of pregnancy and prenatal care. She has been an investigator on federally funded research studies, presented peer reviewed and invited papers on her research nationally and internationally, and published a number of data-based publications.

Lee Ann Hoff PhD, RN is a nurse-anthropologist with extensive clinical, management, teaching, research, and consulting experience in crisis and violence prevention, and sociocultural issues affecting health. She is Research Consultant at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, Adjunct Professor at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Health Sciences, and Visiting Professor at the Institute for Applied Psychology, Lisbon, Portugal. Her major publications include the award-winning book, People in Crisis; Creating Excellence in Crisis Care (with K. Adamowski); Battered Women As Survivors; and Violence Issues: An Interdisciplinary Curriculum Guide for Health Professionals. She is founding Director of the Life Crisis Institute in Boston and Ottawa.

Dr. Hoff was team leader for the MNA Focus Group facet of the U-Mass Lowell PHASE research project.

Barbara Mawn, PhD, RN, Dr. Mawn is a Professor of Nursing and Co-Director for the Center for Public Health Research and Health Promotion at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Shewas a Co- Investigator of the Phase-in Health care study. She was Coordinator of one of the hospital sites and a member of the Case study team. She also helped with the development of the epidemiologic survey used in the study. Dr. Mawn has also been funded as a researcher in an NIH-NIDDK study which examined growth patterns in children withHIV infection. She also is an American Nurses Foundation Scholar - she was awarded research funding from the American 'Nurses Foundationfor her longitudinal qualitative study on Raising a Child with HIV." (edit 072307)

Linda M Coulombe, RN, BS, Ed.C, CNOR, CRCST, has a combined 36 years of nursing, perioperative, and sterile processing experience and is currently the Department Head of Sterile Processing Department & Patient Care Equipment Services at Lancaster General Hospital, Lancaster, PA. She received her RN at Ohio Valley Medical Center in West Virginia; her BS in Healthcare Administration and her Education Certificate from Kennedy Western University in California; additionally she holds CNOR and CRCST certifications.

Linda is President and Founder of LAM, Latex Allergy Management Consulting, and actively assists healthcare facilities in becoming a Latex Safe environment. Linda Coulombe has entertained audiences at many Latex seminars and her work has been published locally and internationally.

Everyone who knows her is familiar with the phrase, "Is it Latex Free?"

Elise Pechter CIH, MPH is an industrial hygienist who has worked in the Occupational Health Surveillance Program (OHSP) at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health for 12 years. OHSP seeks to provide important information about where, how, and why working people in Massachusetts are getting sick or hurt on the job in order to develop effective prevention strategies. Elise works within OHSP to coordinate intervention strategies based on the surveillance data, especially in regard to work-related asthma, acute chemical poisoning, including carbon monoxide and teen exposures on the job, and she assists with traumatic fatality investigations. Prior to her work at the Department of Public Health, she worked for 11 years at the Massachusetts Division of Occupational Hygiene, investigating workplaces for health hazards. Elise has a BS in biology and chemistry from the University of Illinois, MAT in science education from Harvard Graduate School of Education, and MPH in occupational health and safety from University of Illinois School of Public Health, and has several publications on work-related asthma, occupational health and industrial hygiene. Her previous work included teaching nursing students anatomy and physiology, factory work, including meat-packing and production work in a hot rolling steel mill, as well as teaching high school.

Anila Bello MS is a research assistant in the Department of Work Environment at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She holds a bachelor degree in Industrial Chemistry and a Master of Science from the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Her work with Sustainable Hospitals Project (SHP) involves identification of healthier, safer alternatives to formaldehyde used in hospital pathology laboratories. She is currently a doctoral candidate and works on exposure assessment to cleaning agents.

Stephanie M. Chalupka, EdD, APRN, BC, CNS, FAAOHN, is a Professor of Nursing at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Dr. Chalupka also holds an appointment as a Visiting Scientist in Occupational and Environmental Health at the Harvard School of Public Health. A fellow of the American Academy of Occupational Health, she is the author of numerous publications in occupational and environmental health nursing, including the Core Curriculum in Environmental Health for Nurses, published by the American Association of Occupational Health Nurses.

Dr. Chalupka is an appointed member of the National Strategic Planning Committee on the Nursing Workforce and Environmental Health and the International Nursing Coalition for Mass Casualty Education.

Dr. Chalupka has been named an American Association of Colleges of Nursing Academic Leadership Fellow and serves as an environmental health nursing expert to the International Council of Nurses. Dr. Chalupka is a member of the American Nurses Association Task Force to revise the ANA Public Health Nursing Scope and Standards of Practice. She has provided public health nursing consultation to several state health departments including the Vermont Department of Health, Connecticut Department of Public Health and Maine Department of Health & Human Services. Dr. Chalupka has been the recipient of the University of Massachusetts President’s Award for Public Service for her work with refugee and immigrant populations.

Dr. Chalupka is currently a co-investigator of a NIOSH-funded study called “Project SHARRP” Safe Homecare and Risk Reduction for Providers. This project is a collaborative effort of the University of Massachusetts Lowell and the Mass Department of Public Health to evaluate the working conditions of home health care providers, with particular focus on needlesticks, injuries from other sharp medical devices and blood exposures.

Angela Laramie MPH is the project coordinator for the Sharps Injury Prevention Project within the Occupational Health Surveillance Program at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. In this capacity, her work focuses on surveillance and prevention of percutaneous injuries among healthcare workers. In addition to coordinating the statewide reporting system of sharps injuries in hospitals, she has also worked with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to develop and pilot a web based sharps injury surveillance system as well as pilot a workbook on the design, implementation and evaluation of a sharps injury prevention program. Prior to coming to the DPH, Angela spent several years working with health care facilities to implement risk management and injury prevention programs in an effort to minimize occupational injuries.

Angela holds a BS from Clarkson University and an MPH from Boston University School of Public Health.