What is the Impact of Poor Ergonomic Design in Health Care?

Every year, the Canadian health care system spends billions of dollars because of the poor design of health care facilities, work systems, job tasks, work spaces, equipment, and policies and procedures.

Poor design contributes to:

• musculoskeletal disorders and other accidents and injuries for health care providers
• lost time injuries related to patient handling
• medical errors and reduced patient safety
• increased challenges when recruiting and retaining skilled.

There are few, if any, environments where ergonomics is more important than in the health care sector. Significant cost savings can be realized by designing health care facilities, workspaces, and tasks to maximize human performance and well-being.

How Can Good Ergonomic Design Help?

Good ergonomic design is the key to safe and effective delivery of health care services in both acute and long-term care facilities. It helps to eliminate exposures to design-related hazards that can result in costly accidents / injuries. It helps to ensure that equipment, technology, workspaces, and work systems are designed to promote patient safety and reduce medical error. Good ergonomics significantly improves the ability of health care facilities to recruit and retain skilled and knowledgeable workers and to protect the health and well-being of an aging health care workforce.

ESA Can Help You to Improve the Performance of Your Health Care Facility

ESA understands that worker and patient safety, service delivery, and operational costs are a high priority for the health care sector. By applying our expertise related to ergonomics and design in the health care setting, ESA can help with all of these priorities. We can help ensure that health care systems and technologies are designed to enhance human performance. This will improve patient and employee safety, improve service delivery, and reduce costs.  ESA provides high value, cost effective ergonomics consulting services that will improve the performance of any health care facility.