Hospitals are in the business of caring for people, not manufacturing a product. Almost every job in a hospital is affected nurses, physicians, orderlies, transporters, storeroom workers, and operating room staff, to name a few. While these are very different jobs, they would all be treated the same under OSHA s proposal. One of the tasks covered by the standard that nurses, physicians, and other health care professionals may perform is the lifting of patients. Pushing and pulling, as when a patient is transported by wheelchair or gurney are also covered by the standard.
Hospitals have no control over the weight of the patient.
Yet hospitals are treated like other manufacturers under the proposed regulation. There is a lack of consensus in the scientific communities as to the causes and proven remedies for repetitive stress injuries . There are a number of conflicting studies in the scientific and medical literature as to the causes and proven remedies for MSDs. The science is so new that measures to determine and remedy MSDs are simply not yet known. The cost of implementing the proposed ergonomic standard in hospitals will be high.