Background: Assessing the physical demands of the heterogeneous jobs in hospitals requires appropriate and validated assessment methodologies.
Methods: As part of an integrated assessment, we adapted Rapid Entire Body Assessment (REBA), using it in a work sampling mode facilitated by a hand-held personal digital assistant, expanding it with selected items from the UC Computer Use Checklist, and developed a scoring algorithm for ergonomics risk factors for the upper (UB) and lower body (LB).
Results : The inter-rater reliability kappa was 0.54 for UB and 0.66 for LB. The scoring algorithm demonstrated significant variation (ANOVA p