Risk Assessment for moving Individuals SafEly (RAISE) - optimising staff and patient safety

PROBLEM: We are facing unprecedented health & aged care workforce shortages. Workplace injuries contribute to this crisis, e.g. nurses experience an extremely high rate of serious injuries with half attributed to manual handling, including staff-assisted patient or resident movement. Our national survey found health/aged care services consistently offer staff manual handling training for patient/resident movement, however, >90% report Dynamic Risk Assessment (DRA) is a training gap. This is a concern as evidence shows that training alone does not reduce staff injuries, however DRA is promising. DRA provides a continual in-the-moment assessment of factors that impact a process, and for staff-assisted patient/resident movement, DRA ensures that each interaction has staff and patient/resident safety risks identified, then reduced or eliminated.

SOLUTION: The novel Risk Assessment for moving Individuals SafEly (RAISE) program is different. RAISE strives to reduce health/aged care staff injuries, and unlike other programs, RAISE embeds higher orders of risk control via DRA, which integrates with organisational controls that reduce or eliminate risks. Early studies have shown that RAISE-trained staff (incl. nurses, personal care attendants and allied health) embed and sustain risk assessment behaviour into clinical practice during patient/resident movement. Staff also report feeling empowered and confident to assess for risk and reduce/eliminate the risk. We hypothesise that RAISE will reduce (a) staff musculoskeletal pain/injuries, and (b) patient/resident falls.

PARTNERS: We will test RAISE across our four Victorian health/aged care partners, Eastern Health, Monash Health, Cabrini Health and St Vincent's Health, using a randomised stepped wedge design. This will be followed by national scaling to >10 additional health/aged care services via a RAISE Community of Practice, noting 60 Australian health/aged care services have registered interest in adopting RAISE.