Here’s a way to increase life safety awareness among nurses

Brad Keyes

One of my favorite sessions at last week’s Life Safety Code Solutions for Hospitals seminar was a discussion about how to better engage nurses about life safety requirements.

The key, said Brad Keyes, safety consultant for The Greeley Company, is to bring the Life Safety Code into the realm of patient safety.

And that means, for example, not ordering nurses to take a blood pressure cuff machine out of the corridor because it encroaches on minimum clear widths under the Life Safety Code. Nurses won’t relate to rules like that.

Instead, a better approach would be to ask how easily a nurse can move a patient bed and accompanying medical equipment down a corridor during a fire alarm if that same blood pressure cuff machine is in the way. Have nurses think about the delay relocating that equipment would create during a fire response.

“That [delay] may make the difference between life and death for the last person trying to get out,” Keyes told attendees.

We’ll have much more about this topic in an upcoming issue of Healthcare Life Safety Compliance.