Literature Review On Body Mechanics

The Occupational Safety and Health Act purpose is to assure that individuals are working in safe environments. OSHA has been around for over 40 years and has come with many advantages as well as disadvantages. According to OSHA, “nursing homes and personal care facilities has had one the highest injury and illness rates, workers have faced numerous amounts of health hazards, and disorders compared to other work places”. These obstacles occurring in the health care work force has lead to the NYS Safe Patient Handling Act. This act consists of programs ensuring workers are better educated on how to prevent injuries, reduce disorders and improve quality of care towards patients.

During hourly rounds assess the patients pain level and take necessary intervention to alleviate pain, reposition patients who need assistance and make sure that urinals and call light and telephone are within reach of the patient. Taking care of these needs in a timely manner will make the patient comfortable, which will reduce anxiety and stress levels in the patient and reduce the risk of falls. The nurse should always make sure that the environment is safe for the patient by keeping the area clutter free. Comfort measures like tightening the wrinkled bed, giving warm blanket, changing moist dressings or repositioning the tubes or other objects that bothering the patient can enhance their comfort level Monitor high risk patients with delirium, dementia, hypotension, medications, and other conditions which can increase the risk of fall. Providing safety companions for continuous observation and to help the patients will reduce the number of falls. Nurses should educate and encourage patients to use the call light and phone to call for help. Provide patients with appropriate assistive devices like cane, walker as needed to keep them steady. I believe the concept in this theory of comfort can be utilized to reduce the occurrence of falls in health care settings.

Aides spend many hours standing and walking, and often face heavy workloads. Because they may have to move patients in and out of bed or help them stand or walk, they must guard against back injury. Aides may also face hazards from minor infections and major diseases such as AIDS and hepatitis, but can avoid infections by following proper procedures. Most L.P.N.’s work a 40-hour week, but because patients need around-the-clock care, some work nights, weekends, and holidays. They often stand for long periods and help patients move in bed, stand, or walk. They also face hazards from caustic chemicals, radiation, and infectious diseases and also are subject to back injuries when moving patients. In addition, the patients they care for may be confused, irrational, agitated or uncooperative.

During the sessions the focus will be on safety and utilization of body mechanics. Printed materials regarding patient lifting and moving are available via the Employee Health office and will be handed out during the training.

The Nurse and Health Care Worker Protection Act of 2015, or H.R. 4266, was reintroduced to congress in December of 2015 by Representative John Conyers and Senator Al Franken (Mitchell & Dawson, 2016). It is legislation that attempts to protect patients, nurses, nurse assistants, and other healthcare workers from injuries as a result of unsafe patient handling and mobilization. Congress found that in 2014, registered nurses were the sixth largest profession who were reporting musculoskeletal disorders and injuries as a result of their employment with 11,360 cases; the second highest profession in 2014 of reported musculoskeletal injuries was nursing assistants with 20,020 cases (H.R. 4266, 2015).

3432 nurses were included in this study. In addition to nurses 980 nursing assistants were participants of this study. The surveys return rate was 57.3%, some units was as high as 99.6% and as low as 34.4%. (Kalisch, Tschannen & Lee, 2012).

On December 2016, Democratic United States Representative John Conyers Jr., who represents Michigan’s 14th District, introduced national legislation for the third time that calls for a national standard for the safe handling of dependent patients and residents throughout the healthcare system. H.R. 4266, The Nurse and Health Care Worker Protection Act of 2015, directs the Secretary of Labor to issue an occupational safety and health standard to reduced injuries to patients, direct-care registered nurses and all other healthcare workers” by establishing a safe patient handling and injury prevention standard , and for other purposes” (H.R. 4266, 2015). The standard specifies “the use of engineering controls to perform lifting, transferring,

The American Nurses Association (ANA) is supporting efforts to reduce or eliminate musculoskeletal injuries associated with lifting, repositioning, and transferring patients. According to the American Nurses Association (2016), the average nurse will lift 1.8 tons per shift and over 38% of nurses will experience a back injury during his or her career. The ANA endorses legislation that requires healthcare facilities to implement the use of patient handling assistive equipment. Through this initiative, the ANA hopes to ease some of the nursing shortage issues that are compounded by work-related injuries.

Staff injuries that include lower back discomfort and MSD’s are considered of the most common amongst healthcare professionals (Liebert, 2007). Recent articles reflect that a staggering seventy percent of staff injuries are related to direct manual patient handling and transfers (Liebert, 2007). Staff injuries negatively affect productivity levels secondary to lost time (Liebert, 2007). This often creates a viscous cycle leaving less staff to care for more patients. This in turn increases the risks for experiencing an injury onto the overburdened and overwhelmed staff. The use of the Procedural Stretcher with

The population for the research was two postoperative orthopedic units with 29 beds each (Tucker et al., 2012). Nursing staff provided care for the patient with total joint replacement, adult reconstructive surgery, and orthopedic oncology (Tucker et al., 2012). Patient care was directed, planned, delivered, and evaluated by registered nurses only. Data collection was through nurse’s documentation. The SNRI interventions included offering toileting assistance, assessing and addressing patient comfort and position, placing call light Kleenex, water, remote, and garbage can within patient reach. Prior leaving, they would ask the patient if they needed any help, inform the patient that nursing staff will be back, and emphasized the willingness of the staff to respond rather than the patient try to ambulate unassisted (Tucker et al., 2012). To determine the effectiveness of SNRIs there were variables that were examined patient fall rates, patient fall risk, and nursing SNRIs fidelity. The research was approved by the Institutional Review Board for the protection of human subjects. Nurses were allowed to review medical record for fall-related data, participate in the SNRI implementation, and attend focus groups with the study nurses (Tucker et al., 2012).

Maintaining a secure surrounding is a reflection of the organizational culture and an indicator of the level of compassion and vigilance that the organization has for the workers and the welfare of the patients. The management needs to improve safety and assess the causes of error during the handling of patients. As a matter of fact, the stakeholders and the policymakers need to intense their efforts to establish and structure conditions and process that will promote healthy working conditions and improve the patient safety. Health care staff need to be trained in the proper skills of handling patients with terminal and highly infectious diseases. The workers and the management should ensure that the workers are provided with the relevant protective gears while handling a patient. The cases of nonlethal activity injuries are the main reasons for sickness among the staff. Purchase and use of patient transfer and lifting facilities are the key elements of an efficient program to manage the danger of injury to patients and employees related to lifting, moving, locating or movement of patients. It will also show the level of management commitment to implement a secure patient handling program and to supply the health workers with applicable measures to avoid manual handling. The education and coaching of aid staff ought to be in gear towards assessment of hazards within the assistance work setting, choice and use of the acceptable patient lifting instrumentation and devices, and review of research-based practices of safe patient

Balance, strength, and mobility are used in day to day for activity of daily living that are used by both independent and dependent adults. Mobility is defined as “the

Nursing and healthcare continue to change on a daily basis. The one thing that has remained constant during these changes is maintaining the safety of our patients. By maintaining their safety, nurses must ensure that they are keeping up-to-date with the changes in technology now being introduced in healthcare, new and emerging diseases, new equipment, and changes in treatment modalities. One such responsibility is ensuring that nurses do not operate equipment they were not oriented to or trained to use in an effort to prevent injury patients. Nurses and other healthcare professionals are being held accountable for practicing within their scope of practice based on their licensure regulations, and the company policies and procedures. Therefore, nurses are responsible for their professional growth and practice by ensuring that they comply with the necessary standards required by their profession.

In conclusion, several studies have outlined that falls and fall related injuries are leading cause of mobility and mortality amongst hospitalised patients (Ang, Mordiffi, & Wong, 2011; Sahota et al., 2014; Shuman et al., 2016). According to Ang, Mordiffi, and Wong (2011) targeted multiple strategies focuses on identifying patient’s individualise fall risk such cognitive status, medication of the patient that can contribute to mobility issues and a medical condition that could affect the patient bodily functions. Similarly, Sahota et al. (2014) outline that nurses’ role is to provide health teachings and to develop specific interventions that can minimise patient risk for fall. Additionally, health instructions needs to be provided not limited to the patient but also with the family.As a result, patients will become more educated and play a more active role in their care.

The theory of nursing discipline has been adapted from various discipline such as which acts a bridge which focuses on providing complete healthcare to patient. Hence, Nurses are taught the basics of those disciplines and are well diverse in them as well. For example, when a patient gets admitted to the ward, it is the nurse who assess the patient’s condition to assess and identify the need for the involvement of other disciplines like dietitian, speech therapist, physiotherapist, occupational therapist, medical social