Title:
A Room Where Nurses Learn How Not to Get Hurt
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Technology Report.
See text below
Text:
Nurses spend their lives helping other people
recover from injuries and illnesses. Yet nurses
suffer a surprising number of injuries and illnesses
themselves because of their work. In fact, the
United States Department of Labor says nursing is
the second leading profession for on-the-job
injuries. It ranks higher than construction work and
law enforcement. Only freight and stock movers
report higher injury rates.Nurses and other health
care workers do a lot of heavy lifting on the job.
Lifting and moving patients improperly leads to
sprains, strains and muscle tears -- leading causes
of injuries to nurses. Gretchen Gregory is an
instructor at the Sinclair School of Nursing on the
Columbia campus of the University of Missouri. She
says back problems are the greatest threat that
nurses face when they lift or move patients. "You're
talking about people that have handicaps or limited
mobility, that need much assistance. And we have
untrained people to do that assisting and that puts
them at risk for hurting their backs." Ms. Gregory
leads a new training room where nurses can learn to
keep themselves and their patients safe. She says
most nurses lack training in how to lift patients.
"That's not something that we teach in school, but
that's when falls happen and that's when nurses get
hurt."The safe practices room has special training
equipment, including a life-size mannequin doll.
This "patient" can be filled with water and made to
weigh as much as one hundred fifty-nine kilograms.
Ms. Gregory says most American hospitals have
lifting equipment to help nurses move patients. But
she says the equipment is often pushed back in a
corner somewhere -- unused and forgotten. She says
the safe practices room teaches the importance of
using the tools and skills available. The training
room also seeks to improve communication skills and
other practices in a setting designed to copy a busy
hospital or clinic. As Gretchen Gregory puts it: "If
we provide an environment where everything's nice
and quiet and they can give their medications or
they can communicate to a physician when there's
nothing going on, that's not really a real-life
setting. They have to be able to do it with some
distraction."An unidentified donor gave three
hundred thousand dollars to build the new room. The
University of Missouri describes it as one of the
first of its kind at a nursing school in the United
States. You can find pictures of it at
voaspecialenglish.com. For VOA Special English, I'm
Carolyn Presutti.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
