Workplace Ergonomic Assessment: Nursing Job Analysis
The final assignment project for the course is meant to pull together and apply information and techniques from throughout the course. Choose a job that you can have access to. You might have a friend or relative who has a job that you can visit and observe. Preferably the job is one where there are some physical and psychosocial demands. Visit the worksite and ask to observe the person performing the job. You may use still photos and video recordings if the person agrees to let you record them for the purposes of the assessment. Do the following in your assessment:
Perform a task analysis to break the job into steps and record the steps.
For each task, identify any potential risk factors for back or upper limb injury. Prioritize tasks for further risk assessment and indicate those you will quantify.
Interview the worker about the demands in the job and any potential symptoms of fatigue, injury or stress/strain they have. Ask also about the work organization and any psychosocial factors experienced.
Determine which ergonomic assessment tools you will use to further assess risk of either upper limb or back injury in the job. For example, if there is a lifting task in the job, you may choose to use the NIOSH lifting equation and the Snook tables. If there are potential upper limb injury risks and repetition is high, you may decide to count motions. Perform the risk assessment using appropriate risk assessment tools and quantify the extent of risk compared with guidelines.
Make recommendations to reduce risk where guidelines have been exceeded or where the worker indicates there are problems.
Prepare your final report as if it were being given to an employer.
The report should be approximately 2500 words and include the following sections
Objective of the report (e.g., to analyze the risk of injury in X job and recommend solutions to reduce risk)
Background about the job
Methods of assessment (e.g., task analysis, observation, interview, risk assessment tools used, etc.)
Results (include task analysis, risk assessments and comparison with guidelines)
Recommendations
References
Nursing Job Analysis
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Nursing Job Analysis
Job analysis is observing the activities carried out in a job to understand its operational dynamics. Monitoring the activities carried out in the workplace effectively determines the inadequacies and the recommended changes for effective operation. Therefore, this study analyzes nursing as a job of interest to determine the risks of injury associated with it and the relevant solutions that could avoid such risks.
Study Objective
This report seeks to understand the existing risks associated with nursing practices and how they could lead to back and upper limb injury. The study analyzes the relevant causes of the injuries and provides significant recommendations that could facilitate solutions to minimize injury risks. An injury could be physical or mental, depending on the job dynamics. However, the physical injury could easily lead to psychological instability, thus the need to analyze the psychosocial factors experienced by nurses (Martínez-Linares et al., 2019). The study, therefore, focuses on the nursing profession to analyze the tasks carried out by nurses and the risks of injury associated with the profession. This profession's risk reduction solutions would be to promote cohesion among employees and increase the number of nurses in hospitals to stabilize the nurse-patient ratio to reduce overworking among nurses.
Background About Nursing
Besides treatment, the main agenda of nursing is improving the quality of patient care to ensure patients receive adequate care after treatment to facilitate quick and complete recovery. Nursing entails attending to patients offering them food, medication, cleaning and repositioning the dependent patients, and clinical testing for the outpatient patients before visiting a professional doctor. Due to the activities involved in this profession, there are various strains and risks associated with it, such as spinal code injuries, upper limb injuries, irregular sleep-wake patterns, inadequate sleep, loneliness, and social detachment. Work organization, wellbeing, and leadership are parts of the psychosocial factors revolving around nursing.
Methods of Assessment
Measuring mental workload was done using physiological measurements such as measuring heart rate before, during, and after work and measuring secondary task performance. These measurements are crucial in determining the effect work has on the individual's psychological state. Consequently, measuring heart rate and blood pressure is significant in determining work's impact on the person's body (Martínez-Linares et al., 2019). In cases where the work is tedious, it is most likely that the person will have high blood pressure due to increased heart rate. These pressures affect the concentration levels, making it difficult to concentrate more on the task or even on other new tasks. As a result, the highest possibility is that the individual will perform poorly in other tasks. Hence, another mode of assessing the impact of a tsk on the psychical and mental capacity of the person is by measuring performance n the subsequent tasks. When the work is tedious and exhaustive, there are high chances of performing poorly in other subsequent tasks due to low concentration and exhaustion of the mind and the body muscles.
During the evaluation and analysis of the task, the methods applied in determining its impact on the person and the associated risks were observation, interviewing, and failure assessment tools such as NIOSH lifting guidelines. The observation was done by observing the mode of operations among nurses in the hospital. There were identified risks during the operations. The risks were categorized into two categories, those that are likely to cause upper limb injury and those likely to cause back injury. Also, there were interviewing nurses who worked during the day and others who worked during night shifts to determine the differences in operations and job requirements. The interviews involved asking questions related to working hours, the ratio of nurses to patients, the kind of tasks performed, and working groups. The failure assessment tool used in the study was the (National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health) NIOSH lifting guideline. The guideline effectively determined the mode of working applied by the nurses during lifting heavy objects and materials (ErgoPlus, 2012). The injuries were associated with lifting and carrying medicine packages, repositioning dependent patients, and placing the patients on stretchers and wheelchairs from hospital beds and ambulances. There was also a count of motions to evaluate potential upper limb injury risks due to continuous movement of the arms when attending to the patient or when preparing items for taking tests.
Task Analysis
Nursing entails a step-by-step process for adequately executing the duties in line with job requirements. The sequential steps involved in nursing include assessment, diagnosis, planning, implementation, and evaluation (Toney-Butler & Thayer, 2021). During these processes, the nurse is engaged with the patient to ensure ultimate care provision and promotion of effective recovery. As a way of ensuring that the patients are well attended to, the accomplishment of these steps involves some tasks such as testing for physiological processes of the patient's body, reading and interpreting test results, administering drugs, and personalized care to dependent patients such as cleaning, changing of clothes, repositioning, and carrying them around on stretchers and wheelchairs.
In this nursing work, various duties were carried out, which required coordination between mental and physical activities to ensure clarity and carefulness. Some of the strenuous duties that the nurse was carrying out included the following:
* Transferring and repositioning patients, which required manual lifting
* Holding objects for the doctor during the testing and treatment of a patient, or even during minor surgeries
* Pushing and pulling patients on stretchers along the hospital corridors
* Lengthy standing while attending to many patients by testing for normal clinical tests such as weight, blood pressure, and temperature.
According to McCauley-Bush (2011), most of these tasks are tedious and harm the body's physical structure since they require a lot of straining. For instance, pulling and pushing stretchers is likely to impact the spinal code of the nurse. Also, lifting and repositioning dependent patients could be harmful since a majority of the nurses do it without assistance, thus risking hurting the spinal code or the limb since some of the patients are heavy. Standing for a long while attending to patients could impact the curvature of the lumbar spine due to irregular posture when standing. Also, according to the observations made on the hospital's infrastructure, many nurses were at risk of being hit by doors as they entered different rooms and corridors since the doors are set to pull back to shut after being pushed open automatically. Unlike other people in the hospital, such as visitors and patients, the nurses were always in a hurry. They always carried items in their hands, such as files, medical kits, and other treatment accessories. These continuous knocks by surfaces could be dangerous and detrimental to the general structure of the limbs. In other instances, pushing patients on wheelchairs and stretchers had significant risks to the nurses since some paths were sloppy, such as the sideways near staircases. Therefore, pushing a pat...