Health care sector have the sole responsibility of protecting the public health. However, in order to provide safe and effective care to the health care users, it should be ensured that the health care workers or service providers are healthy and safe in their workplace, while providing care services to the consumers. Nevertheless, there are several reports and previous literatures have highlighted a significant rate of accidents or health care related issues experienced by the health care workers. For instance, according to health and safety (HSE) reports, 72,702 non-fatal injuries were reported to health and social care employees along with 144 deaths due to accidents in the workplaces, within the period of 2015 to 2016 (Goetsch 2011). Although several initiatives have been undertaken by government and non-government agencies, the rate is significantly high, which needs a stronger control or regulation system (Tisserand and Young 2013).
While discussing about the health and safety at workplace, like residential care facilities, there are several risk of harm towards the health care workers, which needs to be monitored critically. A safe and effective workplace culture promotes both the service care users as well as service care provider’s satisfaction, which ultimately leads to the improved health outcomes of the patient and improved brand image of the health care organization. Therefore, to run a proper organization, health and safety is critical. Safe workplace helps to create a positive and reliable image, leading to improve employee morale, reduced turnover, increased productivity and reduce overall financial burden of the health care sector. In this context, it is important to assess the possible risks in the organization, which can harm the employees (McCaughey et al. 2013). Therefore, it is important to ensure workplace safety in the health and social care organization. Research is needed in an in-depth manner, in order to identify the key requirements of controlling these kinds of health and safety issues. On the other hand, it is also important to evaluate the key policies and procedures followed by the health care organizations, in order to meet the health and safety legislations in the workplace.
The key reason for selecting this topic is to understand the current situation of the health and social care sector in terms of their worker’s safety as well as to identify the potential strategies for improving the situation. The current research would help to fill the knowledge gap found through reviewing the previous literatures related to the research topic. The research findings would be helpful to the health care authorities to prevent any kinds of accidents of the health care workforce. On the other hand, being a health care worker, I would also be helpful from the findings of the study, as it would guide me to conduct my services in a safe and effective way (Drummond et al. 2015). Here, a specific domain of the health care sector has been selected, in order make the research more focused and enriched, instead of making it a general document. On the other hand, reviewing the key policies, procedures and legal framework of risk management in workplace, in order to ensure safety of staffs would also help the residential care authorities to reform their organizational policies and procedures, which would provide them the opportunity to improve the overall service quality (Hse.gov.uk 2015).
It has seen in many previous literatures that due to lack of awareness, due to lack of knowledge, governance or proper risk assessment programs, the health care workers have faced significant health hazards. For instance, in residential care settings, there is a significant chance of infection spread from the residents, affected by potential pathogens. Moreover, in residential care homes, it has been highlighted by Gibson (2014) that long-term health care workers at highest risk of injury on the job. There are several reasons for that; for instance, workers staying in healthcare sector for long time is prone to experience more infected patients or residents, thereby increasing the risk, the job profile and work burden is also likely to introduce psychological risk for the staffs. Patient violence has also increased, they also lacks training (Hughes and Ferrett 2015). Therefore, the current research would help to find resolution for the above mentioned issues.
It is important to follow the ethical considerations, while conducting a research with social participants. Maintenance of ethical codes helps to protect research participants. For instance, the Data protection act 1998 is an ethical guideline, which needs to be followed, while conducting a research (Melnyk et al. 2011). This act provides the guidelines for protecting the data collected from the research findings, which is crucial, especially while working with human subjects.
The vulnerability of research participants depends upon the physical and social status of the participants. For instance, children and pregnant women are more vulnerable to be harmed research processes. On the other hand, people from low socio-economic background are more vulnerable compared to others (Miller et al. 2012).
There are several potential risks for taking part in the research. Psychological risk includes stress, depression or confusion due to research work or survey questions. On the other hand, breach of research rules related to research data and confidentiality, social and financial risk is there. Physical risks include physical injury, pain or side effects of drugs or interventions (Resnik 2011).
The research ethics is such an essential guideline in research context, which protects the research to be misconduct, by eliminating any kinds of ethical or legal issues. These are also defined as the moral principles, which guide a research study to work with human subjects, without doing any harm to them (Resnik 2011).
There is a strong relationship between law, ethics and morality. Ethics is the guideline, which provides the opportunity to everyone to be treated equality, which the moral right of people or research participants in this context. On the other hand, ethical guidelines help the research to be conducted in such a way that follows the legal framework (Miller et al. 2012).
In UK, the Ethics Committees works for providing the approval to the research works. Evaluating the research proposal and the ethical standards of the research framework, the ethical committee approves the research work to be ethical. The ethical guidelines protect people with the help of this framework.
The qualitative research is such a process, where the qualitative research data are collected from the research participants, where they are provided the opportunity to demonstrate their experience and personal opinion in a scientific background. This method also helps to formulate hypothesis from the research (Taylor et al. 2015).
According to epistemology, usually interpretivism paradigm is appropriate for qualitative research, as in case of qualitative research, the perceptions of human resources are considered for analyzing the findings.
The qualitative research is essentially contributing to the evidence-based practice, as the data collected from the participants are the evidences for the research, as well as these are supported by scientific literatures, thereby aligning with the evidence-based research framework (Silverman 2016).
The quantitative research is appropriate for larger population and includes the statistical data analysis tools. The research data are represented in numerical from, however these are not applicable to the qualitative research, as this research design allows the collection of qualitative data, instead of numerical data. Qualitative research can be conducted with both primary and secondary data sources, but it lacks statistical analysis (Liamputtong 2013).
A particular data collection tool is selected based on the type of the research topic as well as the resource, from where the research is collected (Liamputtong 2013). For instance, in this research the primary resources would be used, thus, interview would be selected as the data collection tool, which is not suitable if the research context was secondary.
There are several advantages of qualitative approach. For instance, it helps to collect in-depth information and suitable for gathering more information regarding the research topic. The data collection tools are cheaper than quantitative approach but it consumes more time compared to quantitative one. On the other hand the chance of biasness is higher due to lack of statistical analysis (Liamputtong 2013). As this study purpose is to evaluate the reasons for employee’s health risk and the adequacy of the policy and procedure’s, qualitative research is suitable, in order to collect in-depth data.
Here, non-random sampling strategy has been used, which is suitable for sampling the qualitative data. The samples would be collected in a non random fashion from 30 health care workers in residential care. Interview has been selected as the suitable data collection process. Interview method is suitable for collecting in-depth information from an open discussion with the participant.
Thematic analysis will be done with the help of the analysis of interview transcript. However, no statistical analysis would be done. It will help to make the analysis descriptive, considering all the elements (Taylor et al. 2015).
The research validity would be ensured by providing appropriate references of the resources used for the literatures analyzed in the study, as there is no scope of statistical analysis. On the other hand, for the primary data collected, the credibility will be ensured by selecting unbiased sample, which is ensured by ethical recruitment of participants (Taylor et al. 2015).
Evidence-based practice refers to the procedure, which is conducted according to the finding revealed from the previous evidences available regarding the topic. Quantitative approach is suitable for the studies, where the sample size is wide and there is a need for statistical analysis. For quantitative study, positivism paradigm and survey method is used as data collection tool, as it helps to collect more data at a time, from a larger sample (Williams 2011). The advantage of this approach is the larger sample and opportunity of statistical analysis. On the other hand, expensive data collection tool is a key disadvantage of the approach.
Conclusion
In the current study, the focus is to ensure the health and safety of health care workers in residential care, while reviewing and suggesting proper recommendation related to the health policy systems, in order to improve the overall policy and procedures. It is proposed that due to lack of proper training and awareness as well as due to lack of proper monitoring, the health risk of health care workers is higher. The current research would go through the collection of data related to the current policies and procedures related to risk management and workforce safety at the residential care, from the health care staffs. These data would reveal the key issues the health care staffs are actually facing; the interview would also reveal the actual reasons or factors contributing to their health risk. Based on the previous literatures, it has been revealed that Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrence Regulation 2013 has a great benefit in identifying key risks and regulating the organizational policies, in order to eliminate or reduce the risks.
Risk assessment tools are nowadays, a crucial tool for regulating organisational risk. Thus, it is beneficial for them to incorporate a risk assessment tool in the organization in order to ensure that the organization is hazard free for the health care workers. In addition, an accident registered can be incorporated, which would registered accidents and incidents in the organization, in order to assess, whether the modifications in the organizational policies are improving the overall quality of health care and safety of the employees in residential care. From the research proposal, I learned a lot relate to the risk management in health care sector, along with the policies and legislative frameworks that should be embedded in regular procedures of the residential care.
Therefore, it can be concluded that the current research has a high potential to contribute in providing information regarding the improvement of health and safety at residential care framework, thereby enhancing the overall service of the health care, while helping in reducing accidents in health care workplace.
References
Drummond, M.F., Sculpher, M.J., Claxton, K., Stoddart, G.L. and Torrance, G.W., 2015. Methods for the economic evaluation of health care programmes. Oxford university press.
Gibson, M., (2014). Health and safety legislation. Occupational medicine, 64(6), pp.441.
Goetsch, D.L., 2011. Occupational Safety and Health for Technologists, Engineer
Hse.gov.uk. (2015). Leading health and safety at work. [online] Available at: https://www.hse.gov.uk/ledearship/casestudies.htm [Accessed 24 Dec. 2016]
Hughes, P. and Ferrett, E., 2015. Introduction to Health and Safety at Work: For the NEBOSH National General Certificate in Occupational Health and Safety. Routledge.
Liamputtong, P., 2013. Qualitative research methods.
McCaughey, D., DelliFraine, J.L., McGhan, G. and Bruning, N.S., 2013. The negative effects of workplace injury and illness on workplace safety climate perceptions and health care worker outcomes. Safety science, 51(1), pp.138-147.
Melnyk, B.M. and Fineout-Overholt, E. eds., 2011. Evidence-based practice in nursing & healthcare: A guide to best practice. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.
Miller, T., Birch, M., Mauthner, M. and Jessop, J. eds., 2012. Ethics in qualitative research. Sage.
Resnik, D.B., 2011, May. What is ethics in research & why is it important. In The national.
Silverman, D. ed., 2016. Qualitative research. Sage.
Taylor, S.J., Bogdan, R. and DeVault, M., 2015. Introduction to qualitative research methods: A guidebook and resource. John Wiley & Sons.
Tisserand, R. and Young, R., 2013. Essential Oil Safety-E-Book: A Guide for Health Care Professionals. Elsevier Health Sciences.
Williams, C., 2011. Research methods. Journal of Business & Economics Research (JBER), 5(3).
Essay Writing Service Features
Our Experience
No matter how complex your assignment is, we can find the right professional for your specific task. Contact Essay is an essay writing company that hires only the smartest minds to help you with your projects. Our expertise allows us to provide students with high-quality academic writing, editing & proofreading services.
Free Features
Free revision policy
$10Free bibliography & reference
$8Free title page
$8Free formatting
$8How Our Essay Writing Service Works
First, you will need to complete an order form. It's not difficult but, in case there is anything you find not to be clear, you may always call us so that we can guide you through it. On the order form, you will need to include some basic information concerning your order: subject, topic, number of pages, etc. We also encourage our clients to upload any relevant information or sources that will help.
Complete the order form
Once we have all the information and instructions that we need, we select the most suitable writer for your assignment. While everything seems to be clear, the writer, who has complete knowledge of the subject, may need clarification from you. It is at that point that you would receive a call or email from us.
Writer’s assignment
As soon as the writer has finished, it will be delivered both to the website and to your email address so that you will not miss it. If your deadline is close at hand, we will place a call to you to make sure that you receive the paper on time.
Completing the order and download