Australian Home Care Workers’ Learning of Safe Manual Handling: Environmental Considerations

Abstract

© 2016, © The Author(s) 2016. How home care workers adapt what they learn in manual handling classroom training sessions to their workplaces (i.e., their clients’ homes) is central to their own safety, as their musculoskeletal injuries continue to occur at unacceptably high rates. For this inquiry, new workers were directly observed in their workplaces following classroom training. Findings from these observations propose three environmental considerations for supporting new workers to learn safe manual handling techniques: (1) The physical setting for manual handling is important, (2) clients and their significant others may offer a valuable form of learning support, and (c) when initially learning the requirements for their roles, new workers should be encouraged to focus only on the manual handling tasks at hand