Reader Poll

What impact do you feel the current economic down-turn will have on safe patient handling and caregiver injury prevention programs?

New Home Care Portal Is Launched

Home caregiver injury prevention and patient safety are increasingly important topics in healthcare.  The new Home Care Safe Lifting Portal covers a variety of patient safety, injury prevention, and patient handling topics such as reimbursement resources, how to assess the patient and home environment for safety, and how to select the proper assistive equipment.  Given the growing number of elderly and disabled being cared for at home, this new portal section should be of great interest to home care agencies, risk and insurance firms, home bound patients, and especially to principal home caregivers. Visit here.

Thanks to Cay Ambrose from Bayada Nurses for suggesting this new portal section.

New Video Field Report Documents Success at Chris Jensen Center

Chris Jensen Health and Rehabilitation Center of Duluth, Minnesota, has been awarded a Safe Lifting Leadership Award, an acknowledgement of excellence in safe patient handling sponsored by the Safe Lifting Portal.com. Chris Jensen Center has achieved outstanding results in implementing its safe patient handling and caregiver injury prevention program. In addition to acquiring safe lifting equipment and training staff personnel, they have embraced safe lifting practices into their culture with exceptional success. To view an excerpt and order a copy of the 11:28 minute video field report documenting Chris Jensen Center’s success, click here.

From the Reading Room

Preparing a home for caregiving

When a relative or loved one needs to be cared for in a home environment, the primary caregiver needs to take some steps to prepare the home for their arrival. Preparing the home for a disabled or ill adult is much the same as childproofing the home for a toddler. Each room must be gone through, reorganized if needed and made as accident proof as possible. Click here for more information.

Manual Handling of Bariatric Patients (Italy)

In Italy, 4 million people are obese and about 16 million are overweight. This situation could jeopardize the country’s national health system: more and more often obese dependent patients need in-patient care and pose new challenges to caregivers in safe handling and transferring.  Bariatric handling can be difficult and risky for the patient and caregiver, requiring expertise and teamwork to design solutions. Identification of high risk tasks, engineering design, and administrative solutions are covered in this article.
Read more here.

Health Care Community responding to obesity epidemic

In response to the growing number of obese, morbidly obese and super obese patients, various adaptations are being made in the health care community, with changes needed at nearly every level of response — from emergency vehicles to gurneys to hospital rooms. These changes include investment in new equipment that can handle more patients who strain the limits of standard equipment, as well as revised training for staff who need to learn how to safely lift and move heavy patients.  Visit here.

Nurses get a boost

Exempla Good Samaritan Hospital in Lafayette, LA, uses new ceiling lifts each time staff needs to lift and move those patients who can’t help lift themselves.  Exempla’s mechanical lifts are part of a growing American trend toward hospitals favoring technology over manpower for lifting patients.  Visit here.

Mission of VA Patient Safety Center of Inquiry

The mission of the VA Patient Safety Center is to support clinicians in providing safe patient care by designing and testing safety defenses related to the patient, provider, technology, and organization. Among the center’s goals are to:

1. prevent injurious falls (specifically focusing on the most serious injuries: hip fractures and intracranial hemorrhages) and minimize adverse events associated with hazardous wandering;
2. promote the safe use of technology associated with injurious falls and hazardous wandering;
3. promote a culture of safety to support clinicians in providing safe patient mobility.

Correction

Last month we featured a story entitled “Setting Up an Ergonomics Program”, unfortunately it was linked to the wrong presentation. Click here for the correct presentation.