Labor Law and HR Department of a Health Organization - Assignment Example

OSHA creates and promulgates professional safety and health standards and provides regulations that implement these standards. The core of OSHA is its responsibility for infection (Peterson & Cohen, 1996). Its inspectors conduct inspections and investigations to determine the compliance status with safety and health regulations and standards. If a work cited is detected as non-compliance, then the employer faces a penalty. Following its inception, OSHA has been a center of controversies, with businesses complaining of too rigid, bureaucratic, and hard-to-comprehend regulations, making compliance difficult.

How the Human Resource Department of a health organization can ensure compliance

According to Lombard & Pynes, 2011, the Human Resource Department plays an important duty in ensuring employee safety and health as they understand the workplace and the employee demands. They should know how and when to use existing resources to take action on employee concerns. They should cooperate with healthcare professionals by participating in the compliance process. The department should recommend that the health organization’s procedures and policies address areas of special concern as highlighted in the OSHA law. Many of these areas fall in their department including risks such as billing of services and items not rendered, upcoding, providing medically needless services, unbundling, and outpatient services offered in correlation with inpatient stays.

To achieve compliance, the HR department should implement policies and procedures which ensure that billing and coding are based on timely and accurate medical records and that there is a process for reporting actual violations by health practitioners so that any deliberate life risks can be well traced (Peterson & Cohen, 1996). The department should also educate the employees on their rights to communicate so that there is a reduction in any potential abuse, waste, and fraud. The communication culture can be encouraged by: announcing to workers that they report incidents of fraud through company policies addressing anonymity, confidentiality, and non-retaliation, sufficiently outlining how risk issues should be reported, by following a certain chain of command.

 It should be emphasized that it is the right of the employee under the OSHA labor law to report any problem and ensure that employees are taught the right way of approaching the compliance officer to make clear a hospital procedure or policy or inquire about any information. The department should also communicate thoroughly and conspicuously post the hotline telephone to be known by all the employees. A safety manual should be prepared by the Human resource department and given to every employee within a health organization. This safety manual should cover every safety and health issue and OSHA safety training is implemented so that clarity is achieved by all employees (Buhler, 2002).