“Cradle to Grave” Manual Handling - Back Exchange conference

Last week I attended the Lancashire and Greater Manchester Back Exchange group’s AGM and “Cradle to Grave” manual handling conference.  There were several presentations as follows:

Posture and Positioning in Midwifery Practice

Picked up some useful information from this talk - like other health care professions back injuries are the main cause of sickness among midwives with 44% being around assisting mothers with breast feeding and 31% around assisting with the birth.  The recent trend towards home births and mothers having the preference of the position they want to be in when giving birth has put more midwives at risk.  Another interesting fact is that a posture is designated as static if held for longer than 4 seconds! (Standard DIN 1005-1 (2000)).  There was a lot of discussion afterwards about getting the balance right between allowing the mother choice and safeguarding the midwives - lots to be done in that area it seems! 

Manual Handling Children - Beth Hallows

A thoughtful presentation with Beth emphasising the need for empathy with parents and accepting that for parents the issues of handling are likely to be different with children responding differently to them than to professionals, time factors when other siblings are around, family wanting to experience outside activities together etc.  As she said, often it takes a long time to gain respect and trust with the professional involved and it may be that we start with introducing something very small to begin with and reduce risks over a longer period of time accepting that the family want to have as “normal” a family life as possible - particularly when the child is very young - with perhaps more substantial equipment being put in place later on when they are larger and more difficult to manage. 

Challenging Behaviour - a unified Approach

This presentation emphasised the need to identify the triggers of the behaviour which may be environmental or involve interaction with carers etc.  The presenter also made the point about the need for consistency of approach and the need for constant evaluation, good staff training etc. 

The conference offered a good opportunity to consider manual handling issues at different stages in life and also to explore some new equipment at the exhibitor stands.