Minnesota's Safe Patient Handling Act: Policy, Practice, and Research

Recorded on October 21, 2020

With the Midwest Center for Occupational Health and Safety (MCOHS)

Webinar Navigation

Minnesota's Safe Patient Handling Act: Policy, Practice, and Research

About the Webinar:

This session presented by the University of Minnesota and Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry will provide a history of the Minnesota Safe Patient Handling Act, a law designed to protect health care workers from injuries caused by lifting and transferring patients. Learners will explore results from a policy evaluation that measured changes in patient handling injuries before and after the law was enacted. The evaluation also identified characteristics of nursing homes with high injury rates and assessed whether the effects of the law were modified by staffing or worker retention levels. Resources developed by Minnesota to support nursing homes in implementing effective safe patient handling programs will also be shared. 

Learning Objectives

  1. Communicate requirements of the Minnesota Safe Patient Handling Act
  2. Identify secondary data sources available to assess state safe patient handling laws
  3. Critically discuss characteristics of nursing homes with elevated patient handling injury rates
  4. Identify potential policy levers to improve occupational health outcomes in nursing homes

Instructors

Breca Tschida, MSPH, CPE, is an ergonomist and industrial hygienist for Minnesota OSHA’s consultative group, Workplace Safety Consultation. She is a Certified Professional Ergonomist and has a MSPH in industrial hygiene. Prior to working for the Minnesota Department of Labor, she was a private consultant in industrial hygiene and ergonomics. Breca has also worked as a health compliance officer and senior member of the ergonomics team for OSHA compliance with the North Carolina Department of Labor.

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Christina Rosebush, PhD, MPH is a recent graduate of the Occupational Health Services Research and Policy program at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her research focuses on the intersection of occupational safety and long-term care policy. Her dissertation assessed differential musculoskeletal injury risk among groups of long-term care workers and evaluated the effectiveness of the Minnesota Safe Patient Handling Act. Prior to coming to the University of Minnesota, Christina worked as an environmental epidemiologist at the Minnesota Department of Health and project manager for Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) evidence-based reports at the Minneapolis VA.

Midwest Center for Occupational Health and Safety (MCOHS)