Lots of people have this "nursing is a wonderful and caring profession" mentality and trust me, it is.

Nonetheless, being an enriching course does not displace the industrial accidents encountered by nurses. 

In the course of discharging their duties, these workers get exposed to a series of dangers ranging from accidents while handling huge patient demands, trying to administer injections on patients who sometimes become hostile to embarking on a colossal walk each day with patients thereby spending a long period on their feet.

It is astonishing to know that even with the near-perfect motherly roles displayed by nurses; they are not left without workplace-related violence, health issues, addictions, and attacks from the very patients they try to comfort and sometimes left without constraints. Nurses and health care workers need to have prior knowledge of work-related risks if they must prevent them.

Popular causes of workplace accidents

People do not take note of the tons of stress nurses and health care workers endure daily. It is important to note that repeated stress injuries make up a ridiculous percentage of injury at work danger.

The average American patient weighs about 80kilos (77 pounds). Women continue to rule the nursing hemisphere even with the ongoing competition between both genders. For an average woman weighing no more than 170 pounds and standing at 5*4", carrying her weight alone on her feet every day could induce fatigue and more with an additional weight saddled on that shoulder daily could be health taunting.

Back injuries take the lead as causes of disabling injuries around the world, although in the US persuading the Social Security Administration to award benefits could be more disabling. Nurses who assist in lifting, positioning, and repositioning patients weighing tons have to endure repeated back pain or injury most times. 

Speculate a situation where a third of American adults get diagnosed with obesity, you can tell that their weight gets more strenuous.

Syringes and needle sticks make up another workplace injury type among nurses as they suffer about 400,000 sharp object injuries annually. With the rise in HIV and other blood-borne diseases like mad cow disease, it becomes even riskier.

Nurses who waddle through such fate do so by constantly washing and milking, bleeding as much as possible thereafter because viruses rapidly multiply in the bloodstream. Those exposed have to quickly undergo a test on HIV alongside other pathogenic tests depending on what they are exposed to. Getting bathed in blood while running a test is not near the fright of inquiring about a tiny tear in the skin that invites pathogens giving rise to infections.

The increasing menace of industrial violence against nurses

Workplace abuse among nurses is a sad but common case. Nurses need to note that they must never let patients or family members at any point impede their escape route or stand at the door in case they need to make a run for it. This points particularly to the ER team whose members have had a series of "take to your heels" adventures to cope.

Most cases of violence by patients are as a result of dementia, and in other times, the action is catalyzed by abusive substances ingested. In high cases, frustrations at increasing health care can induce violence in patients, as well as the stress of having to go through another turn of an annoying diagnostic session with the health workers, which can incur wrath in patients.

26 members of Congress introduced the Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act (HR 1309) recently... 

Nurses everywhere gathered lauding the measure as a welcome development in averting further acts of violence against health care workers in the future.

This will require that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) employ new guidelines enabling employers to engage in new safety measures to avoid any manner of violence from taking place. The bill, if passed, will demand a swift implementation of safe routes and measures to protect workers on duty.

Burnout amongst nurses

It was discovered by a recent study of 600 nurses that about a bisected number of professionals in this field had considered sliding to a less stressful seat. Aside from dealing with industrial accidents and abuses, nurses also have the part of delivering heart-wrecking news daily. 

One instance is when a nurse loses a particular patient they had built a bond with and had deeply cared about sometimes working on a stretch of, say, 10-12 hours to save them but ended up losing.

To cut down on crack-ups, health centers try to mobilize the services of adequate staff to curtail the large slash of overuse injuries resulting from poor availability of practitioners to lift overweight or obese patients. 

They can equally provide enough paid sick leave to deal with both physical, mental, and emotional aches. Scouting for measures to assist health care workers can help them work at their best.

Treating our nurses the way they ought to be treated

Every worker, regardless of their profession deserves the right to work in an eco-friendly stratum egged up with a leveled amount of respect particularly for those tied up with the course of taking care of those who are impaired, medically, psychologically, physically, or emotionally. 

Taking care of nurses and health care workers too could be a way of reciprocating thereby showing them that their efforts are appreciated. Taking adequate legislative measures could also reduce crack-ups and help them work at their best pace.