When you work in a health care setting in Florida, you face numerous work-related hazards, and many of them can lead you to develop serious, and in some cases, lifelong, aches, pains and ailments. At Kaylor, Kaylor & Leto, P.A., we recognize that one of the most significant injury risks you face working in health care comes from transporting heavy patients. We have helped many nurses and other health care professionals who suffered injuries on the job pursue appropriate recourse to help them move forward.
According to Healthcare Business & Technology, today’s nurses, in particular, are prone to experiencing back and musculoskeletal injuries while at work, and they report more than 35,000 such injuries that are bad enough to keep them from working every year. Many of these injuries arise because of the strain shifting and relocating immobile patients places on health care workers’ bodies, but, unfortunately, moving patients around is a largely unavoidable part of the job.
While some hospitals and other medical settings are working to reduce lifting-related injuries among nurses by purchasing lift-assistance equipment they can use when moving patients, many health care environments simply do not have the budget for it. Instead, hospital administrators may encourage team lifting and similar practices, but understaffing issues can make finding enough people to help you lift patients when you need to do so particularly difficult.
To put the dangers you face working as a nurse in perspective, you can look at how your on-the-job injury risks compare to those of people working in other professions known to be dangerous. Comparatively, your risk of suffering an injury at work is higher when you make your living working as a nurse than it would be if you worked in a factory, in construction or in any other job that involves physical labor, exclusively. You can find more about work-related injuries on our webpage.
