Body Mechanics (Nursing)

00:04 Hi guys, welcome to mobility in transferring clients. Now this is something as a skill set as a nurse you're actually going to use quite often, arguably every day. Now this is an important topic, because injury is really high with nurses when we're moving patients, for example, or transferring them, so this is really important to keep in mind about good body mechanics and we're going to show you a couple of methods on how to do that safely. So we're talking about body mechanics, we're really talking about caring for clients and we need to do that in the appropriate way to prevent injury. So this may look like pushing, or pulling, or lifting, or carrying, for example. Now all these things again can really put us at high risk for injury. Now I want to have you take a look at this image here, so we may not do this so much with patients, but the concepts are the same. So when we're talking about pushing or pulling, for example, we want to make sure our trunk is close to that object, having it close to our body is going to be much better in regard to distributing weight and pushing or pulling that. Now when we're talking about pushing make sure you use the muscles that you've got so use your legs, use those glutes and use your abdominal muscles or your core. Now, so when we're going to push it, we want to just have our hands on each side of that object, have your elbows flexed and then we're going to lean by shifting our weight forward now don't be afraid to use that back leg and shift it towards the front side, now of course if we're pulling, we're just going to do the opposite of that, you're going to grasp the object on both sides with those flexed elbows and shift your weight from front to back this time. Now let's take a look here, stooping and carrying, you're not going to see this is much and we really don't want to lift a patient off the floor like this, however, sometimes you may have to move supplies or anytime you have to do this method just make sure you keep these reminders. So when we're stooping down, you want to have a good base at the bottom, so maybe put your feet about 10 to 12 inches apart and one slightly ahead of the other. Now we want to lower your knees, or excuse me, lower yourself by flexing at the knees, this is the other thing to keep in mind, anytime we're about to bend over or stoop, we want to keep our upper body straight and not bend at the waist, because you can tell if I'm trying to pick something up like this with my core, it's not the great body mechanics and we're not using those great really strong muscles we have. Now at this point we can grasp that object, so now we've stooped down to grab the object, now we want to carry it. So again if you remember, just like pushing and pulling, keep that object that's heavy close to your body, that's going to help quite a bit. And just like we talked about, use those supportive muscles, so tighten that core when you're supporting that weight. Now it's important to maintain your center of gravity, if you've got something heavy, you don't want to be leaning forwards or backwards, that really could cause injury and throw you off. Now once we're done here, we're going to place the object down with the same mechanics we used to pick it up.