Healthcare organizations nationwide have made a major push to reduce workplace injuries in the past few years, and unofficial results show fewer work days being lost due to injuries, according to Marnie Myhre, injury prevention coordinator and safe patient handling manager for the Fairview Health System (www.fairview.org)

Nurses and nursing assistants are the most prone to injury because they have the most direct patient contact, according to Myhre and others, with back injuries the most common complaint. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports more than 200,000 work-related injuries in the healthcare industry for 2007, many of which required the injured workers to take time off from work.

Back Injuries May Worsen Over Time

"We used to think that it was a one-time incident that injures your back, but it's cumulative wear and tear on the body," explains Judy Stenswick, employee occupational health nurse for Bethesda Hospital, part of the HealthEast Care System (www.healtheast.org). "The problem with the nursing work is that it's not like working in a factory moving a box of envelopes with a forklift. People don't have handles. They move around. The unpredictability of patients is huge."

And in recent years, some of the patients themselves have become large. "We have a patient who weighs 300 lbs. and people transferring or helping to position the person in bed were getting injured," explains Barbara Baum, an injury prevention consultant at Fairview. "We've needed to get bigger wheelchairs and bigger beds and it makes sense that we use lifting systems."

Ceiling Lifts Help Patients, Staff

"We have to have something that's easy at the point of use, and that means ceiling lifts," adds Myhre. In 2007, Fairview began a three-year initiative to improve safe patient handling, and has been installing ceiling lifts in five of its hospitals to help staff safely move patients to and from beds, chairs and carts, or just to a better position in bed. Before the initiative, there were several barriers to using lifts to move patients, according to Myhre. The only lifts were mobile, and they were stored in utility closets, sometimes behind other equipment, and they weren't necessarily in the best working order. It seemed quicker and easier for staff to move patients manually.

Training Is Key

With the new ceiling lifts, which cost $10,000 installed, patients will also have more confidence in their safety. The key to that safety is training staff to use the lifts.

"Training is a huge part of the whole program because nobody is going to use something they're not comfortable using," Myhre says.

"We've trained `super users' throughout HealthEast to be the eyes and ears on each of the units to help people to be able to use the equipment correctly," says Stenswick. "A lot of them are the nursing assistants, because they are the frontline staff."