Patient Lifting and Moving: Whose Job Is It?

This article demonstrated that the rate of musculoskeletal injury associated with lifting and moving patients is extremely high among prehospital health care providers. This is true despite the fact that OSHA has created standards dedicated to safe patient handling.17 The shortcomings of the presented curricula stem from the lack of direct application to prehospital providers, leading to unnecessarily high and unacceptable rates of provider injury. It was understood from the inception of the automobile that car crashes kill and severely injure people. Yet it was not until 1966 that the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act formally addressed the problem and identified the real causes of injury in motor vehicle accidents on a national level.6 Since then, safety requirements and seatbelt laws enacted by the federal government have drastically reduced injury and fatality rates on the road (9). Inside the health care world, there are numerous related examples. For years it seemed it was accepted that there was a higher rate of disease transference between healthcare professionals and patients carrying blood borne pathogens. Only recently did the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (17) move to require all healthcare agencies to write, maintain, and enforce an exposure control plan (8), leading to quite positive results. Emergency Medical Services (EMS) providers understand the vast differences that exist in lifting and moving patients between inpatient and ...
Source: JEMS Patient Care - Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Tags: Exclusive Articles Patient Care Source Type: news