Thank you for the discussion about evidence-based practice ("How to Bring Evidence-Based Practice to the Bedside," Doing It Better, March 2005). Please expand the discussion to include the impressive body of evidence about the hazards of manually lifting patients. Besides injuring nurses, manual lifting places patients at risk for skin tears, friction burns, bruising, dislocated shoulders, fractures, and being dropped. Yet many nurses are still required to use outdated, unsafe, manual-lifting practices. And when nurses are back-disabled from lifting weight deemed hazardous by the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, most are terminated by employers who say, "There's no light duty, and we don't create jobs."

Nurses can get more information from the Work Injured Nurses' Group USA (see their Web site at http://www.wingusa.org) or by reading Back Injury among Healthcare Workers: Causes, Solutions, and Impacts (CRC Press/Lewis Publications, 2003), which I coedited.

ANNE HUDSON, RN, BSN

Coos Bay, Ore.