Engagement Strategies for Safe Patient Handling in the Rehab Setting

Title: Engagement Strategies for Safe Patient Handling in the Rehab Setting

Author: Elizabeth Mooney, MBA, BSN, RN, CRRN – Regional Chief Nursing Officer, Encompass Health

Abstract: Safe patient mobility is crucial to maintain both patient and employee safety. As our nurse population ages and our rehab patients become more complex, it's important that nursing embraces safe patient mobility programs. In order for a safe patient mobility program to be successful, nursing staff must embrace it and it must become part of the nursing rehab culture. While our company utilizes an evidenced based safe patient mobility program, and employs a safe patient mobility consultant, we struggled to have nursing embrace the program. They would continually revert back to "bad habits" when transferring patients resulting in an increase in falls and employee injuries. Since implementing engagement strategies, nursing has embraced the principles of the safe patient mobility program and it is becoming part of our rehab culture. We have begun to see a decrease in patient falls and employee injuries PLUS the staff is having fun.

The research will be presented during ARN’s 2021 Rehabilitation Nursing Conference, which will be held virtually November 10-12, 2021. Additional information about the conference is available at https://rehabnurse.org/conference/arn-2021.