Dive Brief:
- Nursing employees suffer more than 35,000 injuries each year that are severe enough to force them to miss work, according to the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics. The data show that nursing assistants suffer more injuries than those in any other occupation, followed by warehouse workers, truckers, stock clerks and registered nurses.
- The primary cause of these injuries is the increasingly-difficult task of moving and lifting patients.
- Although it's been known for decades that using "proper body mechanics" to lift patients is insufficient to protect nursing staff from injuries, hospitals have been slow to implement other solutions.
Dive Insight:
Injury rates are only likely to increase given the growing rate of obesity and changes in medical procedure that push for patients to get out of bed and walking as soon as possible, even if they need an extraordinary amount of help.
It's unfortunate that there's no good way to compare injury rates among hospitals, as NPR reports, because organizations are not required by federal or state laws to reveal sufficient detail for any kind of analysis.
"The bottom line is, there's no safe way to lift a patient manually," William Marras, director of The Ohio State University's Spine Research Institute, told NPR. "The magnitude of these forces that are on your spine are so large that the best body mechanics in the world are not going to keep you from getting a back problem."
A number of hospitals have reported reducing their lifting injuries among nursing staff by up to 80% through "safe patient handling," which utilizes machinery and intensive training. However, most hospitals have yet to follow suit.