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Description
Musculoskeletal injuries (MSI) have persisted as the leading category of occupational injury in health services dramatically affecting the occupational welfare of health care workers. Health care workers, particularly nurses, are reported to sustain rates of MSIs that exceed that of workers in other industries. There are various interventions to prevent back pain and injury amongst nursing staff, and most are centered around interdepartmental programs that have a significant impact not only on the welfare of nurses but on the dynamics of the patient care process. A number of programs include engineering-based, behavioral, organizational, or multi-faceted interventions aimed to prevent the incidence of ergonomic injury. A unique approach examined in this study is the use of a lift team, skilled in safe patient handling, to perform the physically demanding tasks of nurses and clinical staff. MSIs associated with patient handling tasks and related indicators, such as work days lost and costs were examined to evaluate the effectiveness of the lift team as a method for safe patient handling and intervention to reduce occupational injury. In a San Diego, CA 301- bed general acute care hospital, data of employee injury trends, separated into two periods: a 22-month pre-intervention period (January 2002 to October 2003) and a 38-month intervention period (November 2003 to December 2006) was analyzed to determine the efficiency of the lift team method for workplace injury prevention and safe patient handling program. Over the 22-month pre-intervention period the average number of MSIs per 100 full-time equivalents (FTE) per month was 7.21, while the 38-month intervention period was lower but not significantly changed, 6.15 (p=0.264). The opposing pre- and intra-intervention trends were significantly lower (p=0.002 and 0.018, respectively) for the amount of work days lost per month and the rate of work days lost per MSI per month. Due to possible disparities in institutional characteristics such as having numerous spontaneous patient lifts or falls that are not initially accounted and prepared for by nursing staff, or differences in lift team characteristics such as member composition and training, the data here do not demonstrate a reduction in the incidence of patient handling-related MSIs from implementing the lift team method. However, post-implementation, a significant drop in the amount of work days lost and the rate of work days lost per MSI. This may be due to a lessening in the severity of injuries sustained accounting for fewer work days off, but this could not be determined with data available. The data presented here support use of the lift team method to reduce time off after injuries but does not directly provide evidence that the lift team method reduces MSIs in an acute care setting.
