A Taxonomy of the Common Tasks and the Development of a Risk Index for Physical Load Assessment in Nursing Job

Background: Nursing service is a nonroutine work with an excessive physical load and diverse tasks. This study derived representative common tasks based on the frequently occurring tasks with a high physical load in the nursing workers' daily work and developed indicators to evaluate the work risk by reflecting the characteristics of nonroutine work. Methods: Common tasks were classified through the following stages: literature review, first focus group interview (FGI) with experts, first classification of common tasks, second FGI with hospital health managers, a survey of nursing service workers, and the final classification of common tasks for each task type. To develop an objective risk index for physical load assessment, we investigated the frequency and duration of the derived common tasks via survey. Results: Nursing common tasks were categorized into six task types and 56 subtasks. To evaluate the risks of various tasks in nonroutine works, three frequencies and three working time levels were defined by examining the task frequency and working hours. Exposure time was defined to reflect the characteristics of a nonroutine job. The final risk assessment was the product of the exposure time level and job intensity level. From this, four risk action levels were derived. Conclusion: This study has the advantage of solving the problem of focusing on some tasks in evaluating the physical load. It was meaningful in that a new risk assessment index based on exposure time was proposed based on the development of an evaluation scale for frequency and time by reflecting the characteristics of nonroutine work.