OBJECTIVES Work-related musculoskeletal disorders (MSD) are quite frequent in healthcare workers (HCWs), but data about MSD in home-based healthcare workers (HHWs) are lacking. In this study we describe the prevalence of MSD among Italian HHWs. MATERIAL AND METHODS A case-control study was carried out among 300 random-selected female HCWs, the sample comprising 100 HHWs, 100 HCWs with a low e...

Manual handling of disabled patients - as regards movement - is one of the major factors affecting acute low back pain of exposed nursing staff. In the absence of quantitative methods assessing this kind of risk, the Research Unit Ergonomics of Posture and Movement of Milan developed in 1997 a risk assessment method called Movement and Assistance of Hospital Patients (MAPO), which is applicable...

International standards highlight the steps required by risk assessment and involving first hazard identification, then risk evaluation and finally, if necessary, risk assessment. To check approach appropriateness to "risk evaluation" from manual patient handling through MAPO, a cross study was carried out in view of checking relationship between this new risk assessment model and occurrence of...

To improve software productivity, when constructing new software systems, programmers often reuse existing libraries or frameworks by invoking methods provided in their APIs. Those API methods, however, are often complex and not well documented. To get familiar with how those API methods are used, programmers often exploit a source code search tool to search for code snippets that use the API m...

low back pain (lbp) is the most common type of musculoskeletal disorder (msds) in transfer tasks such as nursing personnel. financial and economic costs expended for these disorders affect not only the individual, but the organization and society as well. the aim of this study was to evaluate associated factors in the incidence of lbp among nursing personnel according to risk assessment methods...