No longer buried alive

‘troublemaker’

‘With no job, and with Kennett slicing everything out of the health system, that made me angry,’ she says. ‘So I had the time and the drive to do something about it.’

Having previously earned a reputation as a ‘troublemaker’ for standing up to management – often by digging into employer data to support her case for better treatment of her nursing and midwifery colleagues – Elizabeth now began digging into the WorkCover (as WorkSafe was then known) data for the whole state. What she found shocked her.

‘It said that nurses had the highest injury rate in the female workforce in Victoria. And we were second only to transport workers, in the male workforce. The majority of nursing injuries were back injuries from manual handling.’

Manual handling injuries accounted ‘for about 84 per cent of injuries amongst nurses’ according to former ANF (Vic Branch) Occupational Health & Safety Officer Jeanette Sdrinis¹. This is hardly surprising given estimates that on any given shift, a nurse at the time could have been required to lift nearly two tonnes – more than a construction worker might typically have been required to lift!²

The age range of these injured nurses and midwives stood out too: predominantly they were in their 40s. They should have been at their peak, having been in the workforce for a decade or two, but those years of patient handling were accumulating into injuries with lifelong ramifications.

Riding a wave

Data in hand, Elizabeth started approaching people she thought could help but no one was listening. So she went to the media. Her first interview was with Norman Swan on ABC Radio’s Life Matters. ‘And that was the beginning of it,’ she says. ‘Louise O’Shea [of the O’Shea NoLift System] heard me on the radio and rang me and said “I’ve got this program that we are doing in Queensland; would you be interested?” From that, everything started to gel.’

Momentum built, with more coverage from the ABC’s Four Corners and 7.30 Report shining a national spotlight on the issue. ‘That was the thing that did it for us,’ Elizabeth says. ‘I always say: we got this through the media. Once they lit that fuse, it felt like riding a wave.’

Once the media got hold of it, the government started paying attention. But to work with government, Elizabeth needed help. ‘I knew that I needed assistance, so I asked Jeanette Sdrinis from the ANF because it was starting to get out of my league.’³

The ANF had already been working on the issue of manual handling injuries, and in 1997 it published Elizabeth’s research as Buried but not dead: a survey of occupational illness and injury incurred by nurses in the Victorian health service industry. This report helped inform the Branch’s initial ‘no lifting’ policy, which was launched in April 1998 at an exhibition of patient handling equipment⁴.

Victorian Nurses’ Back Injury Prevention Project

By October of that year, ANF Victorian Secretary Belinda Morieson had persuaded Health Minister Rob Knowles to fund a working group, the Victorian Nurses’ Back Injury Prevention Project (VNBIPP), with the aim of facilitating long-term cultural change within the industry. Morieson also secured from Knowles $2 million to help healthcare organisations implement back-injury prevention programs based on the ANF ‘no lifting’ policy.

When the VNBIPP was initiated in 1998, nurses accounted for more than 54 per cent of compensation claims by health industry workers⁵. In 2001, the ANF won the Victorian WorkCover Authority’s Outstanding Leadership in Health and Safety Award for its work to reduce that figure. ‘For nurses going from being the worst industry to getting an innovation award was a big deal,’ Elizabeth says.

By 2004, the Victorian Government acknowledged ‘the outstanding success of the VNBIPP’ in its evaluation of the project, which found:

• a 24 per cent reduction in the rate of standard back injury claims by nurses in Victorian public health services
• a 41 per cent reduction in working days lost due to back injuries.⁶

The successes were so profound that interest in them spread internationally. The USA ‘could learn from the recent remarkable success of Australian health care facilities in reducing the number of nurses injured while handling patients,’ the Work Injured Nurses’ Group (WING) USA reported after attending the ANF’s 2005 No Lifting Expo in Melbourne⁷.

In 2008, ahead of the 10th anniversary of the Branch’s ‘no lifting’ policy, WorkSafe Victoria data showed that musculoskeletal disorders had ‘decreased significantly as a percentage of overall compensation injuries to Victorian nurses, recording a 15 per cent drop across the board [since 2001],’ Jeanette Sdrinis reported in On the Record. ‘The corresponding national figure is only five per cent.’⁸

Pressures of today

Today, ‘no lifting’ policies are widely accepted throughout Victoria, with Safe Patient Handling Coordinators written into the public sector EBA, for instance. But Elizabeth is fearful that gains made could easily be lost, especially in the wake of COVID-19.

While current WorkSafe data show that manual handling claims account for 43 per cent of total claims by Victorian nurses – almost half what they were in the 1990s – the numbers are still too high and ‘with the pressures being applied to the workforce we are in danger of turning back the clock if we’re not careful,’ she says.

Recently, however, Elizabeth was given ‘the best present’ when she went to visit a friend in a residential aged care facility. When her friend stumbled, Elizabeth helped her to steady herself before ringing the bell for the nurse, who promptly told her off. ‘“You’re not allowed to lift,” she told me. That was the best present I’ve ever had: this young nurse, who didn’t know who I was, telling me off for lifting. That’s when I knew it really had gone through. It’s truly amazing, and just shows what can be done with everyone coming on board.’