Home Health & Hospice Week

Giving employees multiple reporting options is crucial.

As sexual harassment allegations continue to climb, both in public and private, "there's no time like the present for health care organizations to ... (re)evaluate their policies and procedures for dealing with sexual and other harassment" and "proactively engage the workforce with a quick onsite harassment training session," urges law firm Hall Render in legal analysis.

Heed this advice from Hall Render to reduce your risk related to sexual harassment:

1. Ensure your agency's harassment policy is straightforward and sets forth clear reporting alternatives so that any employee is not dependent on any one individual or any one reporting line to be able to lodge a complaint.
2. Ensure that individuals who report harassment are insulated against retaliation under the policy and practice of the organization.
3. Require victims and witnesses of harassment to report it. Consider enabling anonymous reporting.
4. Communicate and enforce the harassment policy evenhandedly, with no exceptions based on, for example, executive status or a clinician's productivity.
5. Conduct regular training, beginning at orientation, to ensure management and employees understand their responsibilities under the law and the harassment policy, know how to report harassment, and comprehend that they are required to do so if they are victims or witnesses of harassment. Document such training.
6. Promptly investigate and address any harassment complaints. At the least and in all cases, remind all parties of the harassment policy. Make sure any accused individual is aware that he/she may not retaliate.
7. Document clearly all steps taken to ad-dress harassment complaints and the reasoning behind all decisions regarding the appropriate response in each instance.
8. Ensure that all levels of the organization recognize the importance of fostering a safe and harassment-free workplace, and work cooperatively to achieve this goal.
9. Encourage senior leadership to be engaged with and accessible to the rank and file, in part to enable the leadership to tune in to employees' perceptions about harassment and take steps to address those perceptions before a complaint is filed.

Note: For strategies on combatting sexual harassment from patients, see Eli's HCW, Vol. XXVI, No. 43. See Hall Render's legal analysis on HR issues at http://www.hallrender.com/category/hrinsights-for-health-care.