Safe Patient Handling Research Paper

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SAFE PATIENT HANDLING Quality of the health care system is always a topic of discussion among policy makers and health care professionals as it directly affects patient care. Institute of Medicine (IOM) identified safety as one of the aims for improvement in 2001 (McCabe, 2001). Safety of patients and nurses are always at risk and is never a norm in any health care setting as it involves humans delivering and receiving care. Workplace injuries are very common among nurses that impact both health care providers and the patients.

IMPACT ON HEALTH CARE DELIVERY

Nurses do physical strenuous activity in the health care such as lifting patients, and pulling and pushing equipment because of which they are prone to work-related injuries. According to American Nurses Association survey, 56% of nurses, experienced work injuries in 2011 (S. Lee, Lee, & Gershon, 2015). Occupational injury puts nurses on disability leave, workers compensation or in early retirement. Nurse staffing issue arises because of unexpected injuries and it directly affects the quality of patient care with increased workload. …show more content…

In spite of this program, we have five nurses who are either on light duty or on disability leave related to work injury at present in my unit. I have gone on disability on three different occasions for period of months in my 15 years of practice. Nurses are afraid to use lifting equipment as they are inadequately trained and rarely use them in the patient care. Bigger lift equipment are not placed in ease of access and requires complicated maneuver which again does not make them a choice for easy intervention. Educators talk about such equipment in my hospital but do not demonstrate because of which only few nurse assistants learn to do it and nurses solely rely on them for

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