A Risk Assessment Screening Tool for Community Health Care Workers - Annotated Bibliography Example

The paper “Keeping Community Health Workers Safe" is an outstanding example of an annotated bibliography on health sciences & medicine. Lundrigan, E., Hutchings, D., Mathews, M., Lynch, A. & Gosney, J. " A Risk Assessment Screening Tool for Community Health Care Workers. Home Health Care Management & Practice", is one of those works. In the article, suggestions have been called for to provide a risk assessment tool in the health centers due to the increased cases of workplace-based violence.

The health care center has to ensure the safety of the workers through programs such as an organization that offer commitments to the safety of the employees. The health workers are seen as the group that is more at risk than any other workers are. Various definitions have been provided for violence and may include verbal threats, physical assault, as well as psychological actions. The violence however minor they maybe have a great effect on a health worker. The fact that identification becomes a major issue, the health worker have come up with the criteria of identification of the violators and may include enquires on the history of the clients.

The suggested risk assessment system may include a system where there is a sign in and sign out a system as well as the buddy system. Risk assessments play a key role in the promotion of occupational health and workers safety. To affect the process, health authorities and other experts in the field of risk assessment have been invited to contribute to the process. The call for the two groups helped to came up with prospective risk factor through discussions and brainstorming sessions. The risk assessment instrument was then validated through a thorough comparison of ideas or the potential risk factor.

Lundrigan, E., Hutchings, D., Mathews, M., Lynch, A. & Goosney, J. (2011). Keeping community health workers safe. Home Health Care Management & Practice, 23(1) 27–35. DOI: 10.1177/1084822309360383. In this article, various surveys that had been approved in Canada present the evidence that health workers are usually exposed to violence at the workplaces. The article further provides an overview of the system that has been implemented in the health care centers to respond to the call of violence.

The implementation of WHRAST in the Newfoundland serves to prevent any occurrences of violence on the health workers and it uses both the buddy system and then sign in and signs out systems. The buddy system is used by the health workers during house visits. The WHRAST system uses various questions that are usually conducted throughout the home visits. The system ensures that the lives of the health workers are not endangered in a way and the best protocols are identified at the end of the WHRAST.

Evaluation is performed in efforts to determine the effects of the systems. The first evaluation was conducted four months following the launch and various approaches such as focus group statistics were used. The feedbacks were obtained, duplicated and a copy presented for data entry as well as analysis. In the post-survey approach, only the health workers who carry out home visits were included. All the profession has been represented with more people being the social workers and nurses within the community-based centers.

Most of the people within the survey have shown to have experienced verbal incidences and reported to the police. The focus groups that took part in the survey complemented the sign-in/ sign out system of WHRAST. The participants had a positive response considered that some people knew exactly where they were now. The survey concluded that more awareness had been created, however, most people left out some part due to inadequate knowledge.  The program implementation served as its purpose of creating awareness as well as ensuring safety to a worker, however, a lot of workers still experienced verbal incidences.

McPhaul, K., Lipscomb, J. & Johnson, J. (May 2010). Assessing Risks for Violence on Home Health Visits. Home Healthcare Nurse, Vol. 28. No. 5. According to the article, the study that was carried out served to create and test the measures for risk assessment of violence. The study focus on the health workers who carry out home visits in both the private and public visit in Mid Atlantic State. The study assesses the various risks that the society based health workers undergo that is the verbal and physical assaults as well as the conditions at the workplace on the matter pertaining to safety.

In the study, the measures of steadfastness and validity have enabled a closer approach to the much-needed tools and means of protecting the workers. According to the article, various strengths have been identified which may include the application of the theoretical part to allow the development of novel tools as well as the application of qualitative measures to come up with scale questions. According to a survey that was carried out, five of health workers exposed to violence had to see a physician for treatment while another four received assault that resulted in pain for a whole night.

However, for the four respondents, they in no way visited a physician for treatment since the pain never lasted to the next day. Verbal violence was the highest manifested in the yelling and shouting from the clients suggesting that more need to be done to eliminate this problem. The major limitation comes in where the assigned service partners never turn up especially when attending to clients who are considered more dangerous. The problem of dangerous animals and verbal incidences also offers a challenge to the implementation of the assessment tools.

Different companies have different systems of ensuring safety for the health workers although most of them may not work effectively.