Factors affecting environmental health and safety in healthcare sector

Abstract

Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) is a discipline, which involves creating a culture of health, safety, and environmental protection in a workplace. It provides workplaces that are injury-free and incident-free for all employees, visitors and contractors, as well as enhances the wellbeing of those parties and local communities. Therefore, EHS has a direct impact on morale of stakeholders, employee productivity as well as on organisational performance. Healthcare facilities are specific from others, and customers and workers in healthcare sector are exposed to huge amount of harmful contaminants compared to other working environments. There are many EHS issues that can be identified in healthcare sector, and inability to control such issues will become an epidemic to the whole society. Various factors determine the EHS condition of an organisation such as ventilation, lighting levels, noise, and design of workstations, safety measures in emergencies, to name few. Having a better understanding on those factors will enable the maintenance of effective EHS practices so that the negative impact of poor EHS practices can be minimized. Hence, the financial goals and objectives of the organisation can be achieved. Even though, such importance is there, studies on EHS is hardly found and a less attention has received to this subject. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to critically evaluate the factors affecting EHS in healthcare facilities. A comprehensive literature review was carried out to identify the EHS factors. Five environmental factors and eight occupational health and safety related factors were identified through the review and they be used to study the critical factors affecting EHS of healthcare facilities in future research agenda.