Week 5 Days 1-2

Today we had a manual handling session run by the manual handling director at the hospital. It was really interesting to hear her perspective on the subject and the way she believes it works best in a hospital setting.

Whilst a lot of the tertiery hospitals use manutention, with Fremantle just bringing it in, Bentley has looked at the options and decided that manutention is not the best form of manual handling for them. They believe it costs a lot of money for the workshops or to buy the liscenses to teach it themselves, they believe that a lot of training is needed by everyone to really do it well and safely, and lastly they believe it is too complex for some people to really grasp well enough to perform it correctly and in varying situations. They are definitely not against manutention in anyway, the lady actually really likes it and told us how lucky we were to be trained in it, it just doesn't work well for them. Instead they choose to teach the basics of manual handling, with the things not to do and the best things to do and then allow people to apply that to different situations.

She gave us a few scenarios where you would use manutention and asked us to demonstrate how we would do it and pointed out any flaws. Overall I think we represented ND pretty well! It appears that manual handling within hospitals doesn't normally cause too many problems with physiotherapists because we have such great training in it. Looks like all those labs holding wieghtlifters position has really paid off!