Patient handling risk assessment: First steps applying «Intervention Evaluation Tool» in Portuguese hospitals

Patient handling is one of the main tasks performed by nurses in hospitals and is a known cause of musculoskeletal risk for the staff. Aging of healthcare professionals and concentration of physically demanding healthcare activities during shorter hospitalization periods increases the exposure to physical and mental stressors. Although these stressors have been described in the literature, together with several methods to assess and manage this problem, it is difficult to find a tool with a comprehensive perspective of the different demands of patient handling tasks. To fill this gap Fray has developed an evaluation tool that will allow comparisons across all healthcare areas for future patient handling interventions called Intervention Evaluation Tool (IET) (Fray & Hignett, 2009). This tool as been tested in four European countries UK, Finland, Portugal and Italy with the support of the European Panel of Patient Handling Ergonomics. The IET was previously translated in to Portuguese and used in a trial study in medical wards of two Portuguese hospitals.