Lexington Health Network substantially minimizes risk by improving workplace safety

Lexington Health Network is a privately owned and operated company providing senior living and healthcare services in the Chicagoland area for the past 35 years. Their comprehensive network of care and services include more than 1,700 skilled nursing beds and over 150 assisted living units.
Lexington’s leadership team partnered with Marsh McLennan Agency’s (MMA) healthcare safety team to enhance their safety culture. The goal was an even safer environment for their employees leading to a reduction in claims frequency and severity. To ensure each community is held accountable for sustaining a safety culture, Lexington established a multi-faceted safety program, ranging from corporate support and assigned leadership responsibilities to implementation of standardized safety initiatives.

An important initiative included the development of standards for onboarding new employees and a formalized training platform. The Transfer, Ambulation and Repositioning Program (TARP) is a training program that ensures staff use the correct procedures for transfers and repositioning residents. TARP training is completed upon hire and annually. The corporate team even enhanced the accident investigation processes for injured employees. All injured employees are required to use a telephonic injury triage which provides pre-claim injury assessment for employees to determine the best course of action for any workplace injuries.
A Drug Free Program is also in place that consists of pre-employment and post-accident testing. The MMA safety team went one step further and helped establish a relationship with an occupational health clinic. The service includes pre-hire, post-offer testing and treatments for all employee work-related injuries. The service checks that employees are physically capable of performing their job, thus reducing claim costs over time.

The Lexington team also implemented a safety committee that meets monthly. After establishing consistent safety initiatives, workplace safety tours were led by the Lexington leadership team. With assistance from an MMA healthcare safety advocate, these tours continue to bring current and potential risk exposures to the company, thereby creating a safer workplace for employees. Since deployed, new cut resistant gloves have been purchased, a new monitoring system was created for the dietary department and continual wet floor concerns were addressed. Recently, safety bingo was implemented to raise safety awareness and knowledge among staff and visitors at all communities.

Lexington leaders strive to continually enhance the organization’s safety culture. Over three years, they’ve improved claim costs by 56%, Experience Modification Rating (EMR) by 15%, as well as achieved a 27% reduction in overall claims.