MSD Assessment
Introduction
Hospitals have serious hazards, from lifting and moving patients, to slips, trips, and falls. Caregivers feel an ethical duty to "do no harm" to patients, and some will even put their own safety and health at risk to help a patient.
Hospital work can be surprisingly dangerous!
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the likelihood of injury or illness resulting in days away from work is higher in hospitals than in construction and manufacturing—two industries that are traditionally thought to be relatively hazardous.
High Cost of Injuries
Injuries and illnesses come at a high cost. When an employee gets hurt on the job, hospitals pay the price in many ways, including:
- workers' compensation for lost wages and medical costs
- temporary staffing
- backfilling
- overtime when injured employees miss work
- turnover costs when an injured employee quits
- decreased productivity and morale as employees become physically and emotionally fatigued
Workplace safety also affects patient care. Manual lifting can injure caregivers and also put patients at risk of falls, fractures, bruises, and skin tears. Caregiver fatigue, injury, and stress are tied to a higher risk of medication errors and patient infections.
Rate of MSD Injuries
The category of “nursing aides, orderlies, and attendants” was one of the top five occupations for total days-away-from-work injuries in 2011, and nursing assistants and registered nurses were two of the top six occupations suffering MSDs.
Total counts are influenced by the number of workers in a particular occupation, but it is also worth noting how the injuries are distributed by cause (i.e., “event or exposure”). Almost all of these occupations are dominated by “overexertion and bodily reaction” injuries, which in turn can lead to MSDs. (See figure on right)
Assessing the Size and Nature of Problem
The first step in addressing the issue of patient handling is to assess the size and nature of the problem. Comprehensive reporting of worker injuries helps ensure that you have the data available to develop your hospital's safe patient handling program.
Assessment Steps
Below are some steps you can take to assess your safe patient handling concerns and needs.
- Review injury data for your facility. Injury data can be a useful diagnostic tool. Such data include:
- OSHA 300 Log and OSHA Form 301
- Workers' compensation claim summaries
- Incident/accident investigation reports
- Corrective action reports
- Safety inspections and observations
OSHA already requires many workplaces (including any hospital with more than 10 employees) to use the OSHA 300 Log to report serious job related injuries and to complete the Form 301 for every recordable injury. The OSHA 300 Log and Form 301, available on OSHA's website, help to identify work areas or tasks where injuries frequently occur.
Please see OSHAcademy course 708 OSHA Recordkeeping Basics for more information.
Assessing the Size and Nature of Problem (Continued)
- Examine the overall injury rates and see how they compare to others. Administrators and safety managers can use OSHA's self-assessment checklist to examine your hospital's injury rates and compare them with national averages and high-performing hospitals.
- Examine your patient handling injury rates and start to pinpoint areas of concern. Use OSHA's patient handling self-assessment tool to review and reflect on the number, nature, and cost of patient handling injuries in your hospital.
- Be proactive. A more forward-looking approach, to be used in combination with reviewing injury and illness records, is to be proactive in identifying potential problems that have gone unnoticed, before they result in injuries. Observations of workplace conditions and work processes, job analyses, workplace surveys, and worker interviews are common proactive methods for identifying problems before they result in injury.
Instructions
Before beginning this quiz, we highly recommend you review the module material. This quiz is designed to allow you to self-check your comprehension of the module content, but only focuses on key concepts and ideas.
Read each question carefully. Select the best answer, even if more than one answer seems possible. When done, click on the "Get Quiz Answers" button. If you do not answer all the questions, you will receive an error message.