CONTROL OF CUMULATIVE TRAUMA DISORDERS IN PERSONAL CARE FACILITIES
Open Access
- Author:
- De Toffol, Cedric
- Graduate Program:
- Industrial Engineering
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- None
- Committee Members:
- Andris Freivalds, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Andris Freivalds, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor - Keywords:
- cumulative trauma disorders
health care
nurses
turn stand
ergonomics
human factors - Abstract:
- High turnover has been a major problem in healthcare organizations. One of the fastest growing industries in the United States is nursing and personal care facilities. However, there are occupational injuries because of physical demands, job characteristics, social support and organizational characteristics that contribute to an older worker’s intent to leave the workplace. The main cause for many worksite injuries is in handling individuals who have mobility disabilities. Different kinds of patient lifting devices were evaluated in a laboratory during a previous study made by Pan (1999). One of the devices was the Williamson Turn Stand, and it was shown that this device can substantially reduce stress on the lower back and shoulders of the users. The goal of this new study was to validate the results of Pan (1999) in the real world. In order to do that, nursing aides were videotaped using current procedures, as well as the Williamson Turn Stand, while handling patients and were asked to express the pain felt using the Borg’s scale. The results show that the Williamson Turn Stand significantly reduces the pain (p-value less than 0.05 for the shoulders, the low back and the overall job) and the force on L5/S1 (computed using the University of Michigan Model) was on average 257.8 pound-force in the best case and 418.4 pound-force in the worst case with the Turn Stand and 612.3 pound-force in the best case and 1028.4 pound-force in the worst case without it. Since the NIOSH Guidelines requires compression force to be less than 770 pound-force to consider a job to be safe, the final conclusions of this study are that the use of the Williamson Turn Stand will help significantly reducing the number of injuries among nurses.