Onsite Nursing for Better Employee Health Outcomes

Soaring medical costs are forcing industry to revisit older methods. One that might be making a comeback, however, is the idea of having a plant nurse onsite at your manufacturing facility.

Health Care

Nurses Work to the Top of Their License

The captive insurance industry recommends onsite nurses to their members because they help avoid visits to an emergency department, while ensuring that the needs of the worker are being met. An abrasion may require only first aid onsite, while a cut requiring stitches will cause the worker to go to an ER or clinic. The nurse can help make this decision in an impartial way, resulting in a significant reduction in workers compensation claims.

Work to the top of your license” is an expression in medicine meaning that a healthcare practitioner should “only do what only they can do.” A nurse, for example, should be permitted to do everything they can before referring a patient to a higher level of care, so that the cost of a doctor’s visit is avoided whenever it’s not necessary.

Insulate Nurses From Incentives

It’s important for this concept to work that the onsite nurses not receive rewards or compensation for keeping workers from moving on to a clinic or ER when needed. First, because workers will come to understand this arrangement, and rightly believe that it’s not in their best interest to see a nurse in this case. Second, because ethically nurses must do what’s in the patient’s best interest. Maintaining trust in the system requires that onsite nurses be independent of any personal incentives for minimizing referrals to higher level medical care. Reduced clinical visits should be a natural outcome of the program.

Having onsite nurses will provide a number of benefits both to your employee morale and costs. Nurses can deal with minor illnesses and injury while also serving as the first stage of emergency care for more serious incidents.