Safe Lifting Portal Designed to Back Nurses
Responding to a need for more information related to health care practitioners' safe lifting and handling of patients, a Web site called the "Safe Lifting Portal" has added a new library section filled with information ranging from nursing injury research studies to contemporary articles and legislative initiatives on the broad topic of preventing caregiver injuries incurred when lifting or repositioning patients.
The site, sponsored by Liko Inc., a Franklin, Mass.-based provider of mobile lifts, overhead ceiling-mounted systems, and other products, says its primary mission is to help the staff of hospitals, nursing homes, and other health care facilities locate the background information and resources necessary to justify, initiate, and maintain safe patient handling programs. Site designers say the new library also will be useful for ancillary groups such as facility insurance providers, worker's compensation agencies, risk management firms, and government organizations with an interest n driving down nursing injury rates. At present, according to NIOSH statistics, nurse and other caregivers in the United States are among the most likely to incur musculoskeletal injuries during the course of their work.
"The need for information related to safe lifting is growing . . . as many more health care facilities struggle to get aboard the safe patient handling movement," says Brian Wright, Liko's vice president of marketing and education. "Many times individuals are assigned the task of leading a team or gathering return-on-investment data for management, and we feel confident the Safe Lifting Library will dramatically simplify that task. While search engines are powerful research tools, they can require many hours of work to filter through the published resources and identify the most valuable items. By consolidating safe lifting citations onto a single site and making the information accessible to a worldwide audience, we thus further increase the chances that hospitals and nursing homes will be successful in their injury prevention efforts."
The Safe Lifting Library contains listings of books, articles, and e-links and is accessible via www.safeliftingportal.com/safeliftinglibrary.