Preventing Lower Back Pain Among Nurses: Importance of Ergonomic Education

Slide 1:
Title
Slide 2:
Nursing profession is quite challenging and nurses face several difficulties in
their workplaces which affect their health. Lower back pain is one of such issues
which lead to poor quality of care as well. Nurses from all over the world suffer
from such issue in Australia also, nurses face challenges regarding lower back
pain. Even, some studies revealed that such health issue is responsible for the
absenteeism of the nurses and it is most concerning for the healthcare
industries. Nurses are very close to the patients and also provide constant
support to them and due to this purpose. They are more likely to suffer from
lower back pain than any other healthcare professionals. Stakeholders
associated with it play an effective role in mitigating the risks.
Slide 3:
In order to prevent the prevalence of lower back pain among the nurses, various
intervention strategies can be taken. Integration of ergonomic education to the
nurses can be one of the effective interventions. Ergonomics is a scientific
discipline which addresses human being in the environment to facilitate human
wellbeing. Nurses as a stakeholder, should always include the principle of
ergonomics for the safe of their personal as well as professional care. Safe use of
body and safe patient handling can protect the nurses from different physical
injuries. Even, it can also mitigate the risk of lower back pain among them.
Therefore, the support of nurses as a stakeholder is necessary.
Slide 4:
Different reasons are there behind the prevalence of lower back pain among the
nurses. It has been identified in different studies that due to persistent as well as
repeated patient lifting, nurses suffer from physiological issues that include lower
back pain. Also, transferring of the patient combined with some physical
restrictions also causes lower back pain and nurses are the worst sufferers as
they need to fulfil such heavy responsibilities at their workplace. Again, some
other studies indicated that poor ergonomics of hospital equipments causes
physiological stress like lower back pain among the nurses while working in the
clinical settings. Hospital authority as a stakeholder should hire more staffs and
managers as a stakeholder should revise he infrastructure and hospital
equipments in this purpose.
Slide 5:
Educating the nurses about the ergonomic education is an effective strategy to
reduce the prevalence of lower back pain. It has been identified in many studies
that physiotherapists can provide sufficient support to the nurses in this regard.
Physiotherapists can show some effective postures and techniques of handling
patients while lifting or transferring them. It can help the nurses in avoid back