Introduction: The manual handling of loads has a strong impact on many types of work. All health professionals, due to their job, are subjected to a high risk of disease from the manual handling of loads.
Target: The purpose of our work has been therefore the construction and the validation of a specific tool for the evaluation of both environmental risks and individual limitations of the manual handling of loads / patients.
Materials and methods: The questionnaire we created is composed of two main sections: the first section includes the registry card of the operator personal data while the second section, consisting of eleven items it is further organized into two sections/parts. The first part consists of four items about environmental risk factors, while the second part consists of seven items about generic limitations and the assessment of pain from manual handling of loads.
Results: The operators'health nurses, including those ones with a coordination responsibility, that are available in the structure are 704 while the response rate to the questionnaire was of 93.18%. The test-retest showed optimal values of the intra-class correlation coefficient (0.843) so demonstrating the absence of measurement errors in the two administrations. The values related to the internal consistency of the two sections of the questionnaire were greater than 0.80that also demonstrated the internal stability of the questionnaire.
Conclusions: The tool we described therefore is to be intended as a means of assessment for environmental risks, restrictions on movement of loads and pain associated with the task.
Keywords: Environmental risk; Manual handling of loads; Validation.