eUlift

Preventing low back pain and absenteism through low back pain is essential to keep people at work. There is a relation between working postures and the occurence of low back pain. Correct lifting techniques are essential in preventing the low back pain. People with a high risk, such as caregivers should be trained well.

There is a high prevalence of spine related absenteeism within caregivers. Lifting techniques are hardly customized to the situation or the need of the caregiver and do not rely on the self-thinking ability. Our main focus: how to enhance the long-term learning effect in patient handling for caregivers?

This European Erasmus+ project includes five intellectual outputs. (1) A guide of good practices in patient handling provides a synthesis of best practice and best evidence concerning lifting techniques. With (2) a generic set of learning outcomes we discuss and structure SMART learning outcomes. We continue with defining (3) a new didactical approach to train lifting techniques based on the self-regulated learning. All output serves as content to make (4) a digital application in real-life customized lifting techniques which will be tested and evaluated profoundly by all partners. The app has the ability to simulate the actual environment where transfers will take place. Last, we compose (5) a train the trainer session which will result in a guideline how to train the trainer.

With this project we target to reach every European caregiver, so prevention in low back pain can be achieved, safe patient handling can be applied and to create more satisfied and productive caregivers with less absenteeism due to low back pain.

Our partners: VIVES University for Applied Sciences Belgium (project coordinator), AZ Alma Belgium, Securex Health & Safety Belgium, Athlon S. Coop Spain, Nordic Health Alkmaar Netherlands, Nordic Health Finland and David Gerincklinika Hungary.