by Jennifer M. Smith, Esq.

It may be surprising, but nursing assistants and nurses are at a higher risk for back and other musculoskeletal injuries than workers in the construction, manufacturing, police and firefighting industries, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While slip and fall injuries account for some of these work place accidents, a vast majority of the injuries occur from manually lifting and moving patients. These injuries occur in part because of an aging workforce (the average age of an R.N. is 44 years old) and the rising rate of obesity in patients, which can pose challenges for safe handling.

As the Georgia Nurses Association (GNA) points out, lifting injuries can be severe enough to be career ending and therefore GNA promotes Safe Patient Handling and Mobility (SPHM) programs. These programs emphasize the use of lifting devices and lifting teams rather than individual manual lifting, which is the traditionally trained method of lifting patients. According to an April 2015 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 82% of patient handling injuries in hospitals occurred when lifting equipment was not used. New nursing students are being trained on using lifting equipment, such as hoists similar to those used in the manufacturing industry, but the equipment needs to be available for use and currently only approximately 25% of hospital systems are using such machinery.

While 11 states have enacted laws for safe patient handling (Georgia is not one of them), workers’ compensation insurance carriers are also pushing for industry wide safe handling standards, and for good reason: the high cost of loss-time worker’s compensation claims. Nationwide, total annual expenses for hospital worker’s compensation claims is approximately $2 billion, but hospitals such as Tampa General Hospital have seen a 65% reduction in injuries by using mechanical lifting equipment, as reported in a recent article published by The Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA). You can find the article here.