Anne Hudson, in the middle and in blue, with members of the Injured Nurses Support Group. Anne spoke 24 November 2005 at the invitation of INSG coordinator Elizabeth Langford, first on the left in the front row.
SafetyNet recently had the pleasure of meeting Anne Hudson, RN, BSN, founder of the Work Injured Nurses’ Group in the United States (WING USA), and now author, activist, and advocate for back-injured nurses. Anne was here as a guest of the Victorian Branch of the Australian Nursing Federation (ANF). She was keynote speaker for the ANF’s “No-Lifting Expo” on 23 November 2005 and also spoke at a meeting of their Industrial Relations Organizers. Anne additionally spoke for the Injured Nurses Support Group (INSG) at the invitation of INSG co-ordinator Elizabeth Langford. (Read about Elizabeth's work)
Anne has spent the past few years researching and writing about spinal injury in nurses. She says she would never have become an activist on this issue if she herself had not been back-injured by lifting patients and if her employer had provided light duty work when she could no longer lift. One of Anne’s life ambitions had been to become a nurse and she was able to do this when her children were teenagers. Her desire was to keep working as a hospital nurse until retirement age, but the tragedy was that after her injury, Anne discovered that many US hospitals and workers’ compensation systems operate to discard back-disabled nurses. Anne was basically thrown away – like many thousands of other US nurses, nursing assistants, and other health care workers when they are injured and can no longer lift patients.
In 1990, at the age of forty, Anne graduated from nursing school and found employment immediately in a hospital in Oregon where she still lives. She had been working in an ‘intermediate care’ (subacute) unit when suddenly, in May 2000, she felt severe back pain while at home walking in her kitchen. The pain turned out to be a cumulative trauma injury with bulging lumbar spinal discs and “degenerative disc disease” – the result of many ‘outrageous patient lifts and moves’ over the ten years she had been nursing. Of course the hospital denied that Anne’s back injury was work-related. The claim went to court and took several years to be resolved, but Anne’s lawyer successfully used the research discovered by Anne to establish irrefutably the link between nursing work with patient lifting and degenerative disc disease.
Anne was provided “light duty” work for a limited amount of time but when the specified period of rehabilitation expired (in Anne’s case, she was permitted two separate periods of 90 days of light duty) – that was it. Basically, if she couldn’t go back to ‘normal duties’ that is, if she could not lift patients, she couldn’t go back to work. Anne was not permitted to return to the work she had striven for her whole life and loved. It became clear to Anne that a hospital nurse’s job depends on the strength of her (or his) back; that all the years of study, the years of nursing experience and acquired nursing skills meant nothing.
‘I felt rejected; I felt that losing my nursing position because my back was injured was a denial of everything of value in the heart and mind of a nurse. But I also discovered that what happened to me was not unusual – in fact, it was very typical for back-disabled nurses to be terminated. I became angry when I learned about all the modern patient lift equipment and realised that I had lost my nursing career to an injury which could have been prevented by appropriate equipment. But I also realised that the problem was not just my problem, and it wasn’t just in my hospital, but is a national and international crisis of hazardous manual patient lifting destroying the health, lives, and careers of thousands of nurses and other health care workers.’
US Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that healthcare workers, 90% of whom are women, sustain more musculoskeletal injuries than any other occupation in the US. With such a magnitude of injuries, the health care system could not possibly find enough ‘other’ jobs, and so once nurses could no longer lift patients, they were not welcomed back by their employer. Even sadder was the level of acceptance Anne found amongst nurses: back injury from lifting patients was, and is still, considered an ‘occupational hazard’. The culture is one of ‘injury acceptance’ – and yet these injuries are preventable by using safe patient lift equipment and friction-reducing devices such as slide sheets. The research on “no lifting” has been around for years – demonstrating that nurses and other health care professionals do not have to risk injury to themselves and patients by manual lifting.
So Anne became an activist, highlighting the plight of injured nurses; advocating “no lifting” polices to prevent injuries to nurses and patients, and “permanent light duty” policies to keep injured nurses working; and campaigning for national “no manual patient lifting” legislation in America. In 2002 she founded the Work Injured Nurses’ Group USA (WING USA). The organisation now has a website that provides information, practical advice, and support to injured nurses. Anne Hudson has written, with William Charney, the ‘definitive book’ Back Injury among Healthcare Workers – Causes, Solutions and Impacts. She speaks at many forums and conferences. In June 2005, after much work on the part of the Texas Nurses Association, Anne is excited that Texas has become the first state in the US to pass legislation for safe patient handling. She is hopeful that the rest of the states and the nation will quickly follow with enactment of legislation to protect healthcare workers and patients against needless pain and injury from manual patient lifting.
Victoria:
The Victorian Branch of the ANF formally adopted a ‘No-Lifting’ Policy eight years ago. The union knew that many nurses were being injured – but what was beginning to change was that increasingly injured nurses were putting in compensation claims, and these were increasing. Due to a proactive awareness raising and education campaign, including twice yearly “No-Lifting Expos” run by the ANF (Vic Branch), nurses began to realise that these injuries should be reported and that they were entitled to be compensated.
Once the policy was adopted by the union, it meant having to go out and do the work: in conjunction with the Injured Nurses Support Group (INSG), which had been lobbying around the issue for some time, a meeting was held with the Health Minister, which led to the establishment of the Victorian Nurses Back Injury Prevention Project five years ago, and so on. The union has had success in negotiating, with its members, the implementation of this policy particularly in public hospitals and is making inroads in other areas. The ANF and INSG also put pressure on the regulator, WorkSafe, to take some action. Industry specific guidelines on patient handling and design have now been developed by WorkSafe based on the no lifting policy. As Mary Beth O’Brien, from the ANF’s OHS Unit told SafetyNet, ‘The No-Lifting Policy has also been about changing the mindset and changing the culture that back injury is “just part of the job” for nurses. It’s not enough to simply change the training and equipment.’
The ANF now runs a “No-Lifting Expo” twice each year – these have been very successful and are an important means of ensuring that the message gets out.