The Hidden Cost of Two-Person-Assist Transfers in Skilled Nursing

Staff injury rates cost the healthcare industry 20 billion dollars per year (1).  

OSHA has identified manual patient transfers as the predominant mechanism of injury hurting our nation’s healthcare workers, contributing to this alarming statistic. Indeed, of the nurses leaving direct patient care, 20% cited the physical risks associated with their positions as the reason for transitioning out of their role (1). 

The damage current patient transfer processes impart on the healthcare system at the individual level is alarming, and the further we zoom out to look at the healthcare system as a whole, the more alarming the problem becomes. Twenty-four states have an ongoing “critical emergency” with regards to caregiver shortages across their regions (2), indicating that most care-giving needs are either being met inadequately or not at all. 

Manual patient transfers are injuring healthcare workers at a time when they are already facing a critical shortage.

The problem is only exacerbated when it comes to two-person, or even multi-person, assist transfers in the caregiving environment. It’s a problem that isn’t being talked about enough. 

When a patient needs to move from one location to another, for example, from bed to wheelchair, nurses often have to make the decision to risk their own musculoskeletal health or to call in for reinforcements. 

The individual manual transfer may only take 10-15 seconds, but poses a high risk of injury to the caregiver, and a high fall risk to the patient. Multi-person lift assists, on the other hand, may be safer, but take up to twenty minutes and three or more staff members to transfer a single patient. 

It’s a non-optimal solution in either case. 

Risk injury, or risk time away from critical nursing tasks, such as patient monitoring and assessment, medication administration, data collection, documentation, and even emergency interventions. We want nurses to spend the bulk of their time doing these high-level tasks, functioning at the highest level of their scope of practice. 

It’s good for the individual nurse’s career fulfillment, as well as for the healthcare system as a whole. They are trained to perform complex tasks. 

From an economic perspective, paying nurses to spend the bulk of their day moving patients from one place to another is a lost opportunity that makes little financial sense.

It’s time for innovation in the way we perform patient transfers. The healthcare system needs it, and patients are quietly demanding it. 

There’s a reason our wait-list at ReviMo is full more than a year in advance. 

References: 

1. Healthcare - Safe Patient Handling | Occupational Safety and Health Administration, www.osha.gov/healthcare/safe-patient-handling. Accessed 30 June 2026.
   

2. What Is The Caregiver Crisis? | Johns Hopkins | Bloomberg School of Public Health, publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/what-is-the-caregiver-crisis. Accessed 30 June 2026.