Designed & created by
Gavin Wright
Terms & Conditions 30 Smilie Road, Peterlee, Co.Durham, England. SR8 4AN e-mail
As I have been publicising for some time now, the United States are making a big push in the area of moving and handling (or safe patient handling) as they like to call it. It was inevitable therefore that a professional body would be set up to facilitate the movement. In the UK we have the well respected National Back Exchange (NBE). The USA now have the Association of Safe Patient Handling Professionals (ASPHP). As the NBE have attracted members from a worldwide audience, the ASPHP also are seeking to raise their profile on an international level. There is no reason why this cannot happen. In fact right up until last month, my motto for this web site was “uniting the world of safe patient handling”. This newsletter now reaches almost 1450 people in 21 lands.
Ken Cookson,
RGN, RMN, NEBOSH, M H Adviser
at Aintree Hospitals
NHS Foundation Trust
This non-profit corporation aims to encourage individuals interested in the science of safe patient handling to share experiences, access education and information, and if they choose, to advance their professional status through a Certification Program based on recognized standards. The list of Directors for the organisation includes Ken Cookson from Liverpool. Long standing readers of this newsletter may remember Ken from a story I ran in this newsletter when he donated equipment to Zimbabwe.
Ken, along with Anita Rush, also is one of the authors for the Bariatric section in the newly published 6th edition to the guide to the handling of people.
Enough of Ken, back to the ASPHP. Membership to the Association of Safe Patient Handling Professionals, Inc. is open to all persons interested in the practice and profession of safe patient handling, regardless of level of education, profession or position. Membership is affordable (from $75 -about £47 per year) and offers educational and networking value.
There is an education section which they have entitled “Learning Centre” where they have a number of links to various web sites and resources. I am pleased to say that they felt this web site worthy of inclusion here. Currently I have 16 contacts in the USA but I hope that this figure will rise as a result of this link.
Reading through their material, they seem keen to push forward the idea of promoting the safe patient handler as a professional in their own right, much in the same way as the NBE has done with the role of BCA in the UK. With one slight (but in my view, profound) difference. Whereas the NBE are now looking to appoint someone who could take care of accreditation for the NBE, the ASPHP have started in that position already. I will seriously look at accrediting my courses through the ASPHP until such time that the NBE make it possible to do likewise through them.
It is not often I say this, but I truly believe that this organisation could make a huge difference to the world of moving and handling. Please give me your comments.
