Shoulder Joint Loading and Posture During Medicine Cart Pushing Task

Abstract

Excessive physical loads and awkward shoulder postures during pushing and pulling are risk factors for shoulder pain. Pushing a medicine cart is a major component of a work shift for nurses and medical assistants in hospitals and other health care facilities. A laboratory experiment was conducted to examine the effects of common factors (e.g., lane congestion, cart load stability, floor surface friction) on shoulder joint moment and shoulder elevation angle of participants during cart pushing. Participants pushed a medicine cart on straight tracks and turning around right-angle corners. Peak shoulder joint moments reached 25.1 Nm, 20.3 Nm, and 26.8 Nm for initial, transition, and turning phases of the pushing tasks, indicating that shoulder joint loading while pushing a medical cart is comparable to levels previously reported from heavy manual activities encountered in industry (e.g., garbage collection). Also, except for user experience, all other main study factors, including congestion level, cart load stability, location of transition strip, shoulder tendency, surface friction, and handedness, significantly influenced shoulder joint moment and shoulder elevation angle. The findings provide a better understanding of shoulder exposures associated with medicine cart operations and may be helpful in designing and optimizing the physical environment where medicine carts are used.

Keywords:

• handle
• health care
• medicine cart
• pushing
• shoulder

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors express gratitude for data collection, processing, and analysis by Jacob Banks, Niall O’Brien, Amanda Rivard, and Albert Chang, as well as work on technical facilities apparatus and instrumentation by Richard Holihan, Peter Teare, and Ed Correa. The authors are also grateful to Raymond McGorry and Michelle Robertson for many useful comments and suggestions.