Huge cost of back injuries to the NHS

Taxpayers are footing a £400 million annual bill for NHS staff who have injured their backs at work.

The total includes staff sickness, absence, and wasted training.

The charity BackCare says better training could avoid many of these injuries. Its acting CEO, Sean McDougall, said: “Cutbacks in NHS and local authority spending are apparently intended to reduce waste and increase efficiency, yet the biggest single cause of work-related sickness absence in the health and social care sectors is largely preventable through better training and systems of management.”

Dr Andrew Auty, BackCare’s chairman of trustees, commented: “We want to make sure that every single person working in the health and social care sectors has access to the very latest advice on how to work with patients and service users without injuring their own back.”

Each year, over 80,000 nurses injure their backs at work and 3,600 healthcare workers are forced to retire early. Across the care sector, handling injuries account for over a quarter of all reported injuries to employees.

BackCare launched a new edition of its textbook ‘The Handling of People’, originally published in 1981, at the Disabled Living Foundation’s Moving and Handling conference in London earlier this month.

McDougall added: “Back pain ruins lives and it is costing the NHS a fortune.”

Welcoming the publication of the new textbook, Julian Topping, head of Workplace Health and Regulation at NHS Employers, warns that compensation claims for manual handling accidents to staff continue to rise.