Daraiseh / Macaluso Research Lab
Healthcare workers are consistently exposed to hazards that may cause harm for themselves, patients, and the organization. Healthcare continues to have one of the highest rates of non-fatal occupational injuries relative to other high-risk industries. Stress and burnout are determinants of employee turnover and a serious organizational and financial burden for hospitals.
To address this problem, our lab seeks to cultivate a partnership between academic researchers and organizational decision-makers to strengthen co-production of knowledge, practice innovation, and institutional policymaking to eliminate (preventable) employee harm, improve well-being and increase retention.
Knowledge created through research cooperation with front-line clinicians, practitioners, and administrators will:
- Provide better insight into the safety issues affecting these stakeholders
- Be more relevant to their service areas
- Be more easily incorporated into practice change
We hypothesize that the safety of patients and healthcare providers are linked – a safe, healthy worker can provide safe, error-free, effective patient care. We will make additional efforts to study this link and expand on healthcare’s Triple Aim framework of enhancing patient experience, improving population health, and reducing costs to respond to the Quadruple Aim framework, adding the goal of improving the quality of work life. We intend to promote innovation in employee safety by employing a multidisciplinary approach drawing from human factors, industrial/systems engineering, epidemiology, quality improvement, predictive analytics, health economics, and clinical and operational proficiency to align and embed employee safety research with operations.
