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Training Sessions on Safe Patient Handling Work

A survey conducted by the American Association of Occupational Health Nurses found that nurses who have participated in training sessions on safe patient handling techniques are more likely to use equipment, such as lifts and slides, after the training than before.

The study was conducted in a midsize hospital. Nurses, patient care assistants and patient transport personnel were given two-hour training sessions on how to use patient-handling equipment. One month after the training, caregivers surveyed said they’d used patient-handling equipment when assisting patients out of bed 40 percent of the time, from bed to chair 38 percent of the time and to walk 33 percent of the time. Prior to the training, caregivers used equipment such as lifts and slide sheets only 5 percent of the time.

Three months after the program was put into place there was a 61-percent reduction in the rate of injuries associated with patient handling.

Reinforcing the training and offering refresher classes is important to ensure that nurses continue to use equipment along with the safer techniques they have learned. Otherwise,  researchers say, many caregivers will “revert to less-safe methods for moving patients, deferring to patients’ needs without considering their own safety.”

Laws on safe patient handling have been enacted in five states and introduced in 11 others. They range from a two-year demonstration project in New York to Rhode Island’s 2006 law that requires health care facilities to implement safe patient-handling policies. In October, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) vetoed a bill that would have required all acute care hospitals in the state to adopt “zero lift” policies.

AFSCME is working with the nurse unions of the AFL-CIO on a federal safe patient-handling bill, the Nurse and Patient Safety and Protection Act (H.R. 378). The measure would require OSHA to develop and implement standards that would eliminate manual lifting of patients through mechanical devices. It would also require hospitals to develop a plan in order to comply with the standards, provide refusal-of-assignment protections and contain strong whistle blower protections.

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