Manual handling in healthcare

Patient handling is a known cause of musculoskeletal risk for healthcare staff. A range of ergonomic and other approaches have been used to try to reduce the effects of these tasks, e.g. risk assessment and management, training, equipment provision, culture change. A European collaboration (European Panel on Patient Handling Ergonomics) was formed in 2004 to share information about research on patient handling and develop research ideas for European collaborations. Three collaborations will be described. The first reviewed the implementation of the European Union Directive on Manual handling for patient handling; the second reports the development of a Technical Report (TR ISO/CD 12296) for the manual handling of people in the healthcare sector; and the third describes an Intervention Evaluation Tool that has been produced to allow the evaluation of both single factor and multi-faceted interventions for patient handling.