CHG Hospital Beds® Commitment to Safe Patient Handling
CHG Hospital Beds® offers hospitals innovative strategies to help you achieve your Patient Handling goals. Our unique approach focuses on:
- Identifying ways to reduce unnecessary patient transfers.
- Demonstrating proper patient transfers at the bedside
- Demonstrating proper in-bed patient positioning techniques
- Minimizing the risk of patient and staff injuries during patient transfers and equipment transporting
- Reducing patient handling injury costs and employee leaves of absence due to injury
How many patients does one nurse lift in a day? If the average patient weights 150 pounds, then it’s easy to understand how a nurse can lift thousands of pounds each day. A nurse may not feel that the spinal discs are being damaged from repetitive lifting. When the damage finally extends to the annulus of the disc, pain will then occur. Of course, then it is too late.
Injuries caused by heavy lifting, moving and repositioning of patients in bed is an important issue among hospital staff and healthcare facilities today. Patient handling injuries cause nursing staff back pain and lead to serious musculoskeletal injuries, all the while creating increased injury costs, higher staff turnover rates, increased sick days, and staffing shortages for hospitals.
On-the-job back disorders can result from the cumulative effect of several contributing factors:
- Reaching while lifting
- Poor posture
- Bad body mechanics - how one lifts, pushes, or pulls
- Poor design of the work station
- Repetitive lifting of equipment or patients
- Twisting while lifting
- Bending while lifting
- Maintaining bent postures
- Heavy lifting
- Fatigue
- Lifting with forceful movement
To help minimize the risk and occurrence of back strain, OSHA recommends eliminating patient lifting when possible, and redesigning patient handling tasks to minimize the weight, range of motion, and frequency of the activity on nursing staff.
