RESEARCH ARTICLE
Harmful Effects in Personal Assistants´ Client Transfer Situations
Anette Lind1, Gunvor Gard2, *
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2014Volume: 7
First Page: 1
Last Page: 5
Publisher Id: TOERGJ-7-1
DOI: 10.2174/1875934301407010001
Article History:
Received Date: 10/09/2013Revision Received Date: 17/11/2013
Acceptance Date: 21/11/2013
Electronic publication date: 10/1/2014
Collection year: 2013
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
The aim of this study was to describe personal assistants’ risks for harmful effects in client transfer situations at work. Observation and assessment of their working postures in transfer situations were performed by the Swedish ergonomic regulations concerning “red flags” (AFS 1998:1), by video recordings and by biomechanical analysis. The results showed that among eight home care assistants, four assistants had a low-back posture in client transfer situations which was flexed and/or rotated >60, classified as a harmful effect, a red flag, with a high risk for musculoskeletal workrelated symptoms and disorders and the other four had a risk for harmful effects, yellow flags. The harmful effects were noted in highly flexed and rotated working postures when technical equipment was not used or not possible to use anthropometrically correct. All eight personal assistants´ neck flexion indicated yellow flags, thus there were risks for harmful effect in the neck