Effect of a Nurse Back Injury Prevention Intervention on the Rate of Injury Compensation Claims Peter J. Martin a , Jack T. Harvey a,b, ⁎, John F. Culvenor c , Warren R. Payne b a School of Information Technology and Mathematical Sciences, University of Ballarat, Australia b School of Human Movement and Sport Sciences, University of Ballarat, Australia c VIOSH Australia, University of Ballarat, Australia article info Article history: Received 21 August 2007 Received in revised form 30 September 2008 Accepted 27 October 2008 Available online xxxx Keywords: Nursing Back injury No lifting Longitudinal analysis Evaluation of occupational health and safety interventions 1. The Problem Back injuries among nurses are associated with the high physical loads involved in manual lifting and transferring of patients (Engkvist, Hagberg, Linden, & Malker, 1992). While behavioral interventions have been effective in reducing injury rates in a number of other industries (Krause, Seymour, & Sloat, 1999), the approach of teaching safe manual handling techniques to nurses has been ineffective in reducing the risk of injuries (Carlton, 1987; Department of Human Services, 2002). Garg, Owen, and Olsen (1992) identified many of the factors associated with failures in previous approaches to manual handling among nurses. Given the reported failures of “safe lifting” approaches, the Victorian Nurses Back Injury Prevention Project (VNBIPP) sought to bring about changes in the physical workload, by replacing manual lifting and transferring of patients with modern hoists and other patient transfer devices. The VNBIPP was based upon no lifting principles found in programs developed by the Royal College of Nursing (1999a,b), which had informed the No Lifting policy of the Australian Nursing Federation (ANF) and had been implemented in individual Australian hospitals (Garrison,1998; Gorman,1998). Guidelines for the implementation of No Lifting programs were developed by the Royal College of Nursing (1999a, b) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Feletto & Graze, 1997; OSHA, 2003) and have been implemented in nursing homes and hospitals (Australian Nursing Federation, 2003; Garg, 1999). Studies of the effectiveness of No Lifting policies have been reported in health industry documents (Ashford, Sdrinis, & Doyle, 2003; Engkvist, 2001; Gaetjens, 2003; OSHA, 2003) and the peer reviewed literature (Collins, Wolf, Bell, & Evanoff, 2004; Engkvist, 2004; Passfield, Marshall, & Adams, 2003). No Lifting policies have resulted in reductions in the occurrence of back injuries (Ashford et al., 2003; Collins et al., 2004; Engkvist, 2001; OSHA, 2003; Passfield et al., 2003) of up to 71% (Ashford et al., 2003). Workers compensation claims have also been reduced (Ashford et al., 2003; Collins et al., 2004; OSHA, 2003; Passfield et al., 2003) by up to 97% (OHSA, 2003). Other studies have explored factors associated with the onset of back injuries such as access to employee training and the effect of inter personal conflict on workers compensation claim rates (Gaetjens, 2003). In general, these studies have been single institution case studies (Engkvist, 2001; OSHA, 2003; Passfield et al., 2003) or have covered a relatively small cluster of institutions (Ashford et al., 2003; Collins et al., 2004; Engkvist, 2004). While the results obtained in these relatively small scale studies are impressive, the question remains as to whether similar results can be obtained when implementing a No Lifting policy across an entire health care system, where inhe rent variations in management and practice might be expected to exist across the system. Following an earlier preliminary evaluation (Department of Human Services, 2002), the purpose of this study was Journal of Safety Research xxx (2009) xxx–xxx ⁎ Corresponding author. School of Human Movement and Sport Sciences, University of Ballarat, PO Box 663 BALLARAT Victoria 3350, Australia. Tel.: +613 53279065; fax: +613 53279478. E-mail address: j.harvey@ballarat.edu.au (J.T. Harvey). JSR 00773; No of Pages 7 ARTICLE IN PRESS Please cite this article as: Martin, P. J., et al., Effect of a Nurse Back Injury Prevention Intervention on the Rate of Injury Compensation Claims, Journal of Safety Research (2009), doi:10.1016/j.jsr.2008.10.013