Medical patients often lack mobility, and if part of your job duty involves shifting or moving immobile patients, you may face high injury risks as a result. Heavy lifting often leads to back, musculoskeletal and other injuries, some of which may have a serious impact on your quality of life.
Per Healthcare Business & Technology, injuries that result from lifting patients are so common in hospitals and doctor’s offices that they have become the most significant threat to today’s health care workers. Nurses alone experience more than 35,000 musculoskeletal and back injuries annually that keep them home from work. This number is so high that health care workers now face more injury risks than employees who work in construction or manufacturing.
Contributors to lift-related injuries
Your risk of suffering an injury due to heavy lifting may increase when your employer lacks adequate staff. When possible, many health care operations encourage workers to lift heavy patients as teams. You may understand all too well, though, that finding enough people to help you when you need it is often difficult.
Research also shows that maintaining proper lifting techniques does not help as much as you might like to think. Lifting patients strains your body even when you do everything right. So, the more you shift or move patients, the higher your lift-related injury risk.
Preventative measures
Arguably the most effective way for health care operations to cut risks associated with heavy lifting is to buy equipment that takes some of the strain off of you and other health care workers. Some hospitals and medical offices do not have the money to purchase this equipment. However, if they fail to do so and workers experience injuries bad enough to keep them out of work, they may wind up spending even more on workers’ compensation expenses. Find more information on our webpage.
