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    You are here Home » feedback

    How Employee Feedback May Have Prevented Deadly Meningitis Outbreak

    Last updated on Dec 27, 2012 by Dan McCarthy · This post may contain affiliate links

    Guest post by Beth N. Carvin:

    According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
    (CDC), there have been 590 cases and 37 deaths across 19 states caused from an
    outbreak of fungal meningitis among patients who received contaminated steroid
    injections. The main focus of the national investigation on this disaster is
    the New England Compounding Center (NECC), a pharmacy in Massachusetts. While
    it is the only location implicated in the widespread contamination in 2012,
    ex-employees of Ameridose, a drug-manufacturing organization that has some of
    the same owners of the NECC, have come forward with some shocking claims.
    One ex-quality control technician at Ameridose stated that
    he was overruled by management when he tried to stop the production line when
    he spotted missing labels, according to an October 2012 article in The New York
    Times, while another employee (ex-pharmacist) said she resigned because she was
    “worried that unqualified people were helping to prepare dangerous narcotics
    for use by hospitals.”
    Hearing reports like this must come as a shock to
    well-meaning corporate leaders who cannot be in all places at all times. So
    what can be done to avoid situations like this? And how can executives in other
    companies and organizations prevent such a costly tragedy? One of the first
    steps is creating and maintaining a company culture and work environment in
    which open communication is encouraged.

    Employees should feel comfortable to share their concerns on
    policies and practices particularly those relating to safety and compliance.
    From what many news articles state, employees had strong concerns about
    business practices at both NECC and Ameridose. These specific safety issues
    could have been addressed prior to the meningitis outbreak. If current
    employees are hesitant to talk, HR should also be conducting
    exit interviews,
    particularly in high-risk occupations like healthcare, to identify any areas
    that may put the company, its customers and consumers at risk.

    Managers need to be trained
    on the importance of balancing business needs with safety and to take frontline
    employees concerns seriously. In fact, HR in high-risk industries should
    implement a variety of avenues/opportunities for employee feedback, such as
    phone hotlines, online and on-site suggestion boxes, employee surveys, focus
    groups, new hire surveys and exit interviews.

    At this point in the process, HR should analyze the data and
    information for trends and share important findings with senior management
    along with recommendations.  HR can facilitate discussions and task forces
    for planning and next steps. HR should also be involved with safety committees,
    training and employee development and company mentoring programs. Both 1:1 and
    group mentoring are helpful in high risk workplaces for knowledge sharing on
    everything from quality control and technical skills to how to maneuver through
    corporate politics and the proper channels to voice concerns.

    Employee feedback needs to be gathered systematically in
    such a way that it moves from being anecdotal stories (often attributed to a
    few disgruntled employees) to shining the light on specific, objective trends.
    Even with stringent safety regulations in place, companies in industries in
    which employee error creates a life or death situation should have additional
    safety processes in place.

    Consider the case of the
    air traffic controller at the Honolulu International Airport who “mistakenly
    directed the JAL and the UPS jets on a collision course. At one point, their
    altitude separation dropped to 0, meaning they were headed straight for each
    other, traveling hundreds of miles an hour with about one and a half miles
    between them." It was discovered in the FAA investigation that the
    controller had told his managers he didn’t feel he was ready for certification,
    and had in fact, requested additional training via his training team.
    From an HR perspective,
    this kind of information should come out long before an incident occurs. Those
    current and former employees have the information – it’s up to HR to gather it
    and help solve the problems that could lead to catastrophe. In the contaminated
    steroid tragedy, if HR had identified that safety was being set aside in favor
    of speed and other corners were being cut, they could have made a case to
    senior management for why this was bad from not just a consumer safety
    standpoint but also from a business perspective. And 37 people would still be
    alive.

    Beth N. Carvin is
    President and CEO at Nobscot Corporation (
    www.nobscot.com), an HR technology company that specializes in key areas of employee
    retention and development. She has more than twenty years of experience in
    human resources, staffing, business management, sales and marketing. Beth is a
    nationally recognized expert on employee retention and exit interviews, and has
    assisted with exit interviewing strategy for large, multi-national companies,
    in every industry, and in more than 20 countries. She
    can be reached at bncarvin@nobscot.com.

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