London Health Sciences Centre has been at the forefront of medicine in Canada for 146 years and offers the broadest range of specialized clinical services in Ontario. Building on the traditions of its founding hospitals to provide compassionate care in an academic teaching setting, London Health Sciences Centre is home to Children’s Hospital, University Hospital, Victoria Hospital, the Kidney Care Centre, two family medical centres, and two research institutes – Children’s Health Research Institute and Lawson Health Research Institute. As a leader in medical discovery and health research, London Health Sciences Centre has a history of over 70 international and national firsts and attracts top clinicians and researchers from around the world. As a regional referral centre, London Health Sciences Centre cares for the most medically complex patients including critically injured adults and children in southwestern Ontario and beyond. The hospital’s nearly 15,000 staff, physicians, students and volunteers provide care for more than one million patient visits a year.
For more information visit lhsc.on.ca.
The vital services provided by LHSC are powered by an electrical infrastructure that is extensive and complex.
Since most LHSC facilities operate 7/24/365, it is critical that the electrical infrastructure is highly reliable.
Maintaining this electrical system introduces many challenges for facilities staff. The overall goal is that all maintenance work must be performed efficiently and, above all, safely for everyone involved and must follow industry best practices. To achieve this, LHSC needed to have an electrical safety program in place for their in-house team of Electricians to perform job safety assessments for their tasks, whether testing or troubleshooting or working on de-energized equipment. This means assessing and documenting the risks and then protecting themselves from all hazards including shock and arc flash.
Historically, electrical job safety assessments were completed on paper forms which were onerous and time-consuming for LHSC Electricians and did not provide management the appropriate visibility and audit trails into this important safety process.
In 2016, LHSC decided to implement e-WorkSAFE©. The e-WorkSAFE system is comprised of an Electrical Safety Program to define best practices for the organization, a centralized electrical equipment database, a mobile app for technicians to use on-site, and a cloud platform for management visibility.
The e-WorkSAFE system is designed in partnership with the Electrical Safety Authority in Ontario and in close conjunction with the CSA forElectrical Safety Standard Z462.
The e-WorkSAFE mobile app puts CSA Z462 standard into action as a real-time, mobile job safety assessment and execution tool. e-WorkSAFE helps front-line workers identify and manage all hazards linked to specific tasks and equipment. All equipment data, safety hazards, arc-flash information, and even single-line diagrams, are recorded in the database and are accessible at any time.
The e-WorkSAFE Cloud Portal streamlines the administration of safety management for employees and contractors and ensures compliance to safe work practices providing real-time audit trails of the completed job safety assessments.
LHSC has been using e-WorkSAFE for over 5 years to maintain over 6,000 pieces of electrical equipment. LHSC implemented the Electrical Safety Program together with e-WorkSAFE application, recorded all electrical equipment with arc-flash information and location-specific hazards, and trained all in-house staff and contractors on the software.
LHSC has created thousands of Job Safety Plans using e-WorkSAFE.
The application was adopted by the team after a change management process. It now takes Electricians just a few moments before beginning each job to complete a series of steps to assess the hazards of each electrical maintenance task according to CSA Standard Z462. Where approvals are required, Supervisors are notified and use the mobile app to immediately review and approve Job Safety Plans, saving crucial time. Furthermore, LHSC management now has a central, electronic record of all electrical Job Safety Plans completed, including the hazards encountered and the steps taken to mitigate the risks.
There have been no electrical incidents recorded at LHSC where the app was properly utilized.
The combination of the e-WorkSAFE mobile app and the cloud portal help the facilities team at LHSC meet the challenge of providing important care to the community.
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