Analysis and improvement ofmusculoskeletal disorders associated with blood sampling initiationamong medical technologists

• Main Authors: Lo, Fang Fang, 羅芳芳
• Other Authors: Lu, Jun Ming
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/01025123165383751065

碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 工業工程與工程管理學系 === 104 === Blood sampling is one of the daily routines performed by medical technologists, which highly requires manual operations. The potential risks arehence too important to be ignored. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) associated with blood samplingamong medical technologists through the use of subjective questionnaire and objective evaluationtools. The NMQ (Nordic Musculoskeletal Questionnaire)results of 37 participants showed that the prevalence of the overall MSDs is 97.3%. Among the few body parts, the prevalence of MSDs is highest at shoulders(83.8%), followed by neck (81.1%), hands or wrists(62.2%), waist or lower back (59.5%), upper back (45.9%), and elbows(40.5%). Considering the effects of individual backgrouns and working conditions, one’s gender, height, weight, and BMI, frequency of staying up, alcohol use, exercise intensity, overall seniority, seniority of current job, and working days per week have influence on the prevalence of MSDs. In addition, four ergonomic checklists were employed to assess the risks of MSDs. The results of MSDs checklistindicated higher risks at neck and shoulders, fingers, wrists, elbows, and back. The results of BRIEF showed higher risks at neck, back, left elbow, left shoulder, right hand, right wrist, right elbow and right shoulder. Results of RULA showed higher risks at neck, trunk, wrists, upper arms and forearms. ART revealed higher risks at neck, arms, wrists, fingers, and back. Among them, the analysis results of MSDs are more consistent with that of NMQ, followed by RULA, BRIEF, and ART. This suggests thatthe MSDs analysis can be replacedby NMQ, which saves some more time for the analysis with other checklists. Overall, the major risk factors of blood drawing process are the repeated tasks and imadequatebody posturesbeing performed while checking the test items and insertingthe health insurance card at registration, verifying barcodes and tearing off the tags of barcodes, preparing needles and sample tubes, decontaminating the patient’s skin, inserting the needle, pulling out the needle, and taking off the needle from the needle base. It is recommended to reallocate the manpower and redesign the working environment, so as to reduce the risks of MSDs induced by blood sampling among medical technologists.