Workplace safety: Body mechanics

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Transcript
Content Reviewers
As a nursing assistant, your job involves a great deal of physical activity, like carrying and transferring clients and objects, which might cause an injury to your muscles, bones, and joints.
This is called work-related musculoskeletal disorder, and the injuries may occur gradually over time or may happen all at once without warning.
Alright, the most commonly injured parts of the body are the back, neck, shoulders, and arms. In fact, back injuries are the most common and most concerning!
Symptoms include decreased range of motion, limited mobility, and pain when standing up or changing positions. Also, you may feel numbness or tingling in your thighs or legs, which indicates a nerve injury.
Alright, there are several factors that increase your risk of having a musculoskeletal injury, such as sitting or standing in one position for a long time and assuming a poor posture, like bending or squatting frequently.
Also, your risk of injury increases if you stretch your body to reach far objects above your shoulders, carry objects when you are feeling tired and fatigued or objects that are too heavy, and twist or bend your body when carrying an object.
Walking on a slippery floor and working in narrow spaces, like hallways and bathrooms, can be risky as well. Now, there are certain client caring activities that can put you at a higher risk for musculoskeletal injury.
These include, transferring clients who are totally dependent on others for movement, transferring combative clients, or transferring clients from bed to the chair or vice versa.
Also, you may get an injury when changing a client’s position on a bed or chair, if you bend while making their bed or when you are bathing or weighing them, or when trying to stop a client from falling down.
Now, to understand the reason why work-related injuries occur, we can look at the principles of ergonomics. “Ergo” means work and “nomics” means “study of,” so ergonomics means the study of work.
These principles focus on the workplace environment, equipment, and the way the task is performed. Now, the three factors in the workplace that increase your risk of injury are force, repetition, and awkward postures.
So, the more force you exert to perform a task, like transferring a heavy client, the more stress you place on your muscles, which increases the risk of injury.
Also, when you perform a task repeatedly for too long, like when crushing medications for clients, you will be using the same joints and muscles over and over, and this makes them susceptible to fatigue and injury.