Workplace Safety

In this installment of my series examining outreach letters that fed-OSHA recently sent to facilities with 2010 DART rates of 2.0 or higher, I’m looking at “Homes for the Elderly” (NAICS 623312), commonly referred to as residential / community care or assisted living facilities. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, “This U.S. industry comprises establishments primarily engaged in providing residential and personal care services (i.e., without on-site nursing care facilities) for (1) the elderly or other persons who are unable to fully care for themselves and/or (2) the elderly or other persons who do not desire to live independently. The care typically includes room, board, supervision, and assistance in daily living, such as housekeeping services.”

In this installment of my series examining outreach letters that OSHA recently sent to facilities with two or more 2010 DART incidents, I’m looking at Nursing Care Facilities (NAICS 623110), commonly referred to as nursing homes. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, “These establishments have a permanent core staff of registered or licensed practical nurses who, along with other staff, provide nursing and continuous personal care services.”

A few weeks ago I wrote about the 15,000 outreach letters that OSHA recently sent to facilities with two or more 2010 DART incidents. What I’ll be doing next is going through that list and cross-referencing recipients with a DART rate database to see how individual sectors did. For no particular reason, let’s start with the airlines (NAICS 481111). To keep taunting, deflection and hate-mail to a minimum, I won’t mention any names.

Colorado is the only state that still requires physicians to use the out-dated, third edition of the AMA’s Guides to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairment, published in 1990. The most recent, sixth edition of the Guides, was published in 2008. The Guides instruct physicians how to assign percentage ratings of impairment, which is defined as the loss, or loss of use of a body structure or function. The third edition of the Guides was important because it introduced a new way, called the “range of motion method”, to assign impairment to for the lower back. This method relied on the physician using two inclinometers (circular, plastic devices that register motion) simultaneously to record the amount an injured worker could move in flexion, extension, left lateral flexion and right lateral flexion. The method required numerous measures and a series of computations after the measures were recorded. Physicians frequently got it wrong.