Video Transcript - Video with Dr. Yassi - Show me the Evidence (Fall 2012, Volume 1, Issue 3)

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Safe on the Job: Reducing Infection Risk for Health Care Workers

Health care workers face many risks on the job. In Canada, the SARS outbreak made that clear as these workers were the hardest hit by the infection.

But efforts to protect health care workers from infectious disease are often inadequate, particularly in countries with limited health resources.

Dr. Annalee Yassi
School of Population and Public Health
University of British Columbia

Even if we have all the technology available through modern medicine, and we have the medications we need, if we don't have the people we need to provide the prevention, the diagnosis, the treatment, the care and the support, then the health care system just doesn't work.

If a health care worker, for example, develops an airborne disease such as tuberculosis, the person is not only a risk to themselves and their family and the public, but also to coworkers and especially patients, particularly those who are immune-compromised. So it's crucial to protect health care workers as a component of protecting the patients and the health care system at large.

To help reduce health care workers' risk of illness, Dr. Yassi and her team developed a web-based program called OHASIS.

OHASIS is designed to collect and analyze data about infectious disease rates in health care settings.

OHASIS consists of various modules, as you can see here: the incident reporting and investigation module, workforce health, workplace assessments. We have a module that's specifically for members of the health and safety committee to make it easy for them to get the information that they need, and infection control. And a module called OHASIS analytics, which really makes it easy for researchers to do multivariate analysis on the various data in the system.

OHASIS is a global project.

OHASIS was developed with the input of a large number of people, really from across the world. Especially in South Africa, where it is used quite extensively, but also with a lot of assistance from other people through the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre Network, as well as the International Labour Office networks and the International Commission on Occupational Health.

Dr. Yassi's team has shared the OHASIS source code with partners in other countries.

The partners will be able to build and maintain their own OHASIS systems.

Our focus is indeed on capacity building, which means not only providing tools but providing educational resources, doing the training, creating the networks, helping to develop policies and procedures, and developing international guidelines.

Programs like OHASIS will be increasingly important as the world faces new infectious diseases.

It doesn't matter whether the next organism is a new SARS organism or a new Ebola-type virus, or, in fact, we already have totally drug resistant TB. What matters is the capability to quickly identify it, develop what's needed to provide the diagnosis and treatment, but also to ensure that the basics for infection control are always in place, regardless of the new emerging organism that might come about. This means ensuring that health care workers have been trained, have the resources they need to do their job safely, and are not too overworked to provide the counselling and follow-up of patients that's needed.