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Manual handling: what patient factors do nurses assess?
Author(s) -
COOK GLENDA,
NENDICK CHRIS
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
journal of clinical nursing
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.94
H-Index - 102
eISSN - 1365-2702
pISSN - 0962-1067
DOI - 10.1046/j.1365-2702.1999.00272.x
Subject(s) - manual handling , task (project management) , medicine , lift (data mining) , patient safety , risk assessment , nursing , psychology , health care , operations management , computer science , engineering , computer security , systems engineering , economics , data mining , economic growth
• Since 1990, the philosophy of `safe lifting' has become unacceptable in clinical practice and it is now recommended that nurses do not manually lift patients at all. • A comprehensive moving/handling assessment should be undertaken and should include assessment of the handler's capability as well as the load (patient), task and environment. • This exploratory study focuses on assessment of the load, aiming to identify the patient variables nurses assess when planning moving/handling requirements of adult patients. • Patient variables were identified from a literature review and provided the base for a semistructured postal questionnaire. • Questionnaire responses were subjected to a Principal Component Factor analysis resulting in extrapolation of 5 factors accounting for the majority of variability in the data. • In addition, a further 33 new patient variables were reported to be important in this type of assessment. • Issues for further investigation are highlighted and implications for teaching moving/handling risk assessment are drawn from the findings.