Knowledge and Practice of Body Mechanics Techniques among the Nurses

Purpose: Poor body mechanics are often the cause of various musculoskeletal problems. Nursing is a job that needs lot of muscle exersion, because of which many are at risk for developing physical strains and spinal injuries. So purpose of the study was to assess the knowledge and practice of nurses regarding body mechanics. The secondary objective of the study was to find out correlation between the knowledge and practice of nurses regarding body mechanics. Relevance: Awareness can be created and advises can be given for different body mechanics principles in during work. Ergonomic training can be arranged according to the requirement. Participants: Data was collected from 301 nurses including 184 nursing students and 117 nursing staff with the non-probability purposive sampling. Methods: Descriptive approach was used with structured knowledge questionnaire and practice checklist from various government and non government hospitals and colleges. Analysis: Cross sectional Survey and descriptive correlation design was adopted for the study. Result: The extent of knowledge in 301 nurses are, 56.4 %-Good, 41.4 %-Moderate and 2.1 % are having poor knowledge; 3.6 %-Good, 62.9 %-Average and 33.6 % are doing Poor practice. There was a weak positive correlation between knowledge and practice of body mechanics, that was r=0.270. Correlation was significant at 0.001 the level (2-tailed). Conclusion: Though the nurses were having knowledge about body mechanic but less practicing it. Further studies can be done with the major sample size, including many areas of various citie, specific according to experience and according to specific demographic variable so that to generalise the results. Implications: Nurses need to be more educated about body mechanic technique and they should be emphasized to practice it in performing nursing procedure. This is important to ensure that the implications of the misuse of body mechanics such as back pain can be avoided.