Hospital Electrical Hazards: Why is Electrical Safety Important?
Electrical hazards may not be the first thing you think about when talking about hospital workplace safety. However, inadequate electrical safety in healthcare facilities can lead to burns, shocks, fires, or even death.
In this article, we’ll go over the importance of practicing safety precautions in handling electrical devices, how to prevent electrical hazards, and other safety considerations in a healthcare setting.
Why Is Electrical Safety Important?
Electricity is a fundamental energy source that powers homes, workplaces, and, notably, our healthcare facilities. Being so commonplace, it can be easy to forget just how dangerous electricity can be. If not used carefully, you can be a major risk of electrical fires, burns, shocks, and even death.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) recognizes electrical hazards as a serious threat to life and health in the workplace. Electricity can cause serious injury or death when it's not safely managed. Electrical hazards are a significant cause of workplace fatalities and injuries in the United States, with the majority of these fatalities occurring among non-electrical workers.
The healthcare industry needs to conduct electrical hazard assessments, develop prevention and response protocols, and train their employees in electrical hazard safety in order to reduce the risk.
Basic electrical safety is crucial in the healthcare industry because electricity is used for daily operations. Training ensures safety and smooth operations and prevents accidents. You cannot afford to skimp on safety when your business is life or death.
What Are the Statistics of Electrical Injury?
Electrical injuries can be fatal, with four main types: electrocution, electric shock, burns/arc blast, and falls from height, often involving ladders and overhead electrical lines. Burns, both internal and external, are the most often common injury when someone is electrocuted.
Electrical injury statistics are staggering, often in the hundreds and thousands. We have collected some of the most recent numbers, so you know, no matter the circumstances, not to take electrical safety lightly:
• An average of 4,000 people electrocuted in the workplace annually
• Broken electrical equipment causes 140,000 home and workplace fires annually, causing 4,000 injuries and 400 deaths
• In 2019, 166 died from electrical accidents out of 100,000 electricians
• Estimated 500-1,000 deaths from electrical injuries annually in the U.S
• Approximately 30,000 non-fatal electrical injuries annually
• Treatment costs for non-fatal injuries range between $1-4 million
Is Hospital Electrical Safety Really a Problem?
Hospital electrical safety is more precarious than you might think simply because the hospital ecosystem has a lack of knowledge about the proper precautions.
OSHA's electrical standard applies to healthcare facilities, requiring all electrical equipment to be factory-certified or NRTL tested. However, hospitals and other facilities experience a unique lack of enforcement because The Joint Commission (TJC) doesn't regulate the level of electrical certification in hospitals. The industry lacks a consistent standard due to the individual facility's decision-making process regarding equipment safety certification.
To make matters worse, individual facilities may not even control equipment procurement. Hospitals may contract out biomedical engineering services, and those third-party providers may not include electrical safety in their decisions. In-house procurement may be ignorant of the indicators that equipment has OSHA-mandated electrical safety certification or testing.
Selecting a reliable contractor is crucial for drafting regular inspection and safety compliance plans, requiring qualifications such as experience, medical sector knowledge, and regulatory awareness.
What Are Electrical Hazards?
Electricity and electrical equipment can present many safety hazards to personnel and patients. An electrical hazard is a workplace risk that exposes workers to Burns, Electrocution, Shock, Arc Flash/Blast, Fire, and Explosions.
BE SAFE by identifying, avoiding, and preventing all of these electrical hazards (OSHA). The BE SAFE acronym broken down means:
- Burns: Burns are the most common shock-related injury, resulting from electrical, arc/flash, or thermal contact with overheated electric equipment.
- Electrocution: Electrocution is a fatal injury caused by exposure to a lethal amount of electrical energy.
- Shock: Shock occurs when the body becomes part of an electrical circuit, causing the body to react reflexively to the passage of electric current through its body.
- Arc Flash/Blast: Arc flashes occur when high-voltage gaps cause a breakdown between conductors, releasing electrical energy through the air, potentially causing high-temperature burns and rapid heat, resulting in pressure waves.
- Fire: Electrical distribution fires are frequently caused by faults with fixed wiring, including malfunctioning outlets and old wiring, as well as cables, plugs, receptacles, and switches.
- Explosions: Explosions happen when combustible gasses, vapors, mists, or airborne dust come into contact with electricity and ignite an explosive combination of components in the environment.
What Are the Causes of Electrical Hazards?
According to OSHA, electrical hazards can spring from a number of conditions in the workplace. Examples of the causes of electrical hazards that may appear in hospitals include:
- Improper grounding
- Exposed electrical parts
- Inadequate wiring
- Damaged insulation
- Overloaded circuits
- wet hand contact with equipment
- Damaged equipment
- Unsafe work practices
- Mismanaging electromagnetic interference
- insufficient preparation for power grid failures
What Are Examples of Electrical Hazards In a Hospital?
Commonly used hospital equipment, such as defibrillators, use electrical exposure as a part of treatment. This heightens the risk of electrical injury, as most equipment is designed to block electrical exposure in any way. Electrical shock to healthcare workers has resulted from faulty equipment, accidental discharge, and equipment mishandling. Defibrillators also get used near flammable materials during oxygen, though the risk of starting a fire is historically rare.
Another example is that patients have sustained burns when electrical monitoring devices are used during MRIs, most often from ECG electrodes. However, pulse oximeters and MRI coils have also caused burns.
Along with the new hazards of working with equipment that presents an active risk through proper use, healthcare workers must also be aware of more common hazards of working with electrical equipment. Electrical shock can occur by overloading circuits and medical-grade power strips. Using frayed cords or wires connected to site-owned equipment or personal hardware also creates hazardous situations.
Incidents during the use of individual devices are one category. Sometimes these occur as a result of unsafe work practices, like unplugging equipment by the cord or plugging it in with wet hands. In other cases, the fault is with the equipment. Equipment should be regularly inspected for exposed wires, short circuits, and insulation breaks that may energize the equipment's enclosure.
Healthcare facilities use powerful electrical equipment and lots of it. That's why circuit overloading is a common hospital electrical hazard. Circuit monitoring systems are essential, but so is the responsible use of electrical equipment. It’s important that staff recognize these risks to their own safety, and that of patients and visitors. This basic awareness should be complemented by some best practices.
Is OSHA Training for Healthcare Workers Available Online?
Although the safety threats in hospitals and other healthcare facilities are quite different, obtaining an OSHA 10 card for General Industry—available in both English and Spanish—will provide you with a good foundation in vital and relevant workplace safety topics.
Then, you can customize your safety education further with these healthcare-specific courses that cover regulations and guidelines from OSHA and TJC.
We've been an accredited, OSHA-authorized training provider for over 20 years. Our online training is self-paced and available 24/7, so you can complete your coursework whenever and wherever it's most convenient. Head to our website to enroll today!
