A new bill introduced in Washington, D.C. looks to protect the safety of nurses and health-care workers.
Last week, U.S. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) and U.S. Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) introduced the Nurse and Health Care Worker Protection Act in the Senate and the House of Representatives, respectively. The bill would establish safety standards that include forbidding nurses from manually lifting patients.
Another part of the legislation builds on private sector efforts to address injuries among nurses, who statistically experience more injuries on the job than do construction workers.
“Our nurses and health-care workers provide essential care to millions of Americans, and they shouldn’t have to sacrifice their safety or their livelihood to do so,”said Franken in a statement. “Every year, thousands of these caregivers sustain serious injuries as a result of manually lifting patients. These injuries can cause a lifetime of chronic pain and even force nurses to leave the profession permanently.”
“By literally lightening the burden on nurses, we can lessen the nursing shortage that is driving up health-care costs across the country and denying patients the experienced caregivers they deserve,” added Conyers in a statement.
The introduction of the bill won the approval of such people as American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. “Nurses and other health-care workers put their patients first,” said Randi Weingarten. “Sometimes, these workers get physically hurt by helping the people they care for. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, nurses and other health-care workers continue to have some of the highest rates of work-related back injuries from lifting, transferring or repositioning patients, while 38 percent of nurses suffer from pain severe enough to require leave from work.”
“Every day, nurses and other health-care workers suffer debilitating and often career-ending musculoskeletal disorders when they manually lift or move patients, and work in pain,” added American Nurses Association President Pamela Cipriano in a statement. “Manual lifting is an unacceptable risk and practice when we have the technology and knowledge to significantly reduce injuries. This bill signals that workers are not expendable and injuries are not tolerable as just ‘part of the job.’”
The legislation also follows a previously distributed OSHA memo that detailed new ways inspectors for the U.S. Labor Department can ensure that worker safety is protected on the job.
Nurses and health care workers suffer from work-related musculoskeletal disorders at a rate higher than the average American worker. In 2014, registered nurses ranked sixth on the list days away from work (11,300) because of injuries such as MSDs.