Table safety part two: the essential checklist

By Brandi Schlossberg

As a wellness professional, your primary goal is to help enhance the health of the clients and patients who come through the doors of your chiropractic office. Achieving this goal depends on one’s skills and training. However, improving the health of your patients also depends on something much more basic — a solid safety protocol around the chiropractic table.

No matter how thorough your evaluation and treatment plan may be, if you aren’t following an essential safety checklist, then you could end up doing more harm than good.

Here, we will cover a few key points that should have a permanent place on your checklist for table safety.

Inspect and test

Create a consistent schedule for inspecting and testing every chiropractic table you use. You may decide that a safety check should be performed on your chiropractic tables at the start of each week. This usually entails taking a close look at the table to make sure all the nuts and bolts are secure and all the functions are working properly.

Train the staff

Train any and all staff members how to operate the chiropractic table and how to prevent possible accidents. Staff members should know that it’s imperative to keep people away from the table except for the patient or client receiving treatment from a wellness professional. This is especially important when it comes to small children, who could be crushed when the table moves around.

Clean the surfaces

Many chiropractors find it helpful to create a standard protocol for keeping the surfaces clean so that no client or patient runs the risk of getting an infection or having any other issues associated with a dirty chiropractic table. Avoiding this safety issue is as simple as wiping down the table on a regular basis, along with the use of protective covers for extra care.