Making the Business Case to Initiate, Evaluate, and Sustain Safe Patient Handling Programs

Funding of patient safety initiatives in healthcare organizations often take precedence over employee injury prevention programs such as safe patient handling (SPH) despite substantial published evidence that preventing musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) sustained when manually moving and lifting patients can produce significant cost savings for healthcare organizations. This article, the first of a two part series, describes cost data including direct and indirect employee costs and operational losses that should be included when developing a business case for SPH, how the use of injury data can help determine where initial SPH interventions are needed, examples of how to develop “return on investment” calculations, and the establishment of baseline measures so that the effectiveness of the SPH interventions can be measured.

Enos L

Keywords: business case, work-related musculoskeletal disorders, safe patient handling