Case Study Workplace design for a health care and nursing professional

The company is a clinic for psychiatry and psychotherapy with an attached nursing station.

The man has a back condition and right shoulder-arm syndrome. Therefore, he should not lift heavy as well as carry and avoid certain postures, such as bending, while performing work. He also has hypertension, which causes further limitation in physical work. The GdB (degree of disability) is 50.

The man is a trained health care worker and has worked for the company for many years.

As a nurse, the employee has to perform a wide range of tasks and work. The ward is occupied by fourteen patients with severe mental disabilities. Independent personal hygiene is not possible for them. When caring for the patients, they had to be lifted and carried manually time and again. In addition, unfavorable postures were often assumed under the most difficult conditions, such as on the toilet or in the bathing area. In the bathing area, the stresses increased even more, since the permanently installed bathtubs required the caregivers to assume strongly bent-forward postures when grooming the patients. In addition, the elevated room temperature and the very high humidity were an additional factor during exercise. Due to hygiene or incontinence, patients are required to bathe or shower several times a day. The employee is part of a team consisting of seven nursing staff and works in a three-shift system (three employed people each for the early/late shift and one for the night shift). Due to the high physical strain, there was a lot of downtime among the employees, so that the employee often had to do all the work with only one colleague.
In order to make the time-consuming nursing work easier, especially for the nurse with a severe disability, and to reduce the strain, the bathing area of the ward was equipped with assistive products. For this purpose, a lifting bathtub was installed that can be adjusted to the required height, so that the caregiver no longer has to lean forward heavily when washing the patients, as was previously the case, but can work in a favorable ergonomic posture. A mobile lift was purchased to make it easier to lift patients into the tub.

By using the lifting bathtub and the lift, the physical demands in the bathing area could be greatly reduced, so that the caregiver with a severe disability can continue to perform his job in the long term.

Bathtubs
Mobile lifter with belt seats for transfer of one person in sitting position
Mobile lifter with fixed seat