At my new job on a med-surg floor, we have only two pieces of lifting equipment: a sit-to-stand machine and a hoyer lift. When you want to use them, they never seem to be around. They are shared with other floors and are underused because the experienced nurses see it as a big to-do to scour the floor for them and get the patient into the harness. For that reason, most of the experienced nurses never want to bother using them. They see it as more convenient and efficient to just recruit a bunch of personnel from the hall, including as many male nurses as are around, and utilize these 4 to 6 people to, in my opinion, unsafely transfer patients who are as heavy as 250 lbs, have dementia, and hit people.
Just the other day, my preceptor asked me to "get in front of this guy" who was 71 years old, 300 lbs, demented, and combative. He also had sprained something in his leg from falling a while back and was unwilling to stand. So 4 other people and me had to reach under his arms and bear all his weight onto our backs to try and shuffle him from the bed to the wheelchair so that he could be discharged. We did get him into the wheelchair but he was about to fall forward at one point and so my preceptor had to charge forward into his gut and ram him with her head in order to stop his fall forward and send him backwards into the wheelchair instead. It was one of the most absurd things I have ever taken part in.
I made a point to say it would be a better idea to take time to use the lifting equipment on a patient like that next time and she agreed, but I believe that when transferring heavy patients, many nurses feel that it is quicker to just get a whole lot of people and get it done without the use of equipment, regardless of how much it hurts our backs.
What I resent is that the next time this happens, and I refuse to transfer a heavy patient that should really be transferred via equipment, that I will be seen as unskilled, lazy, or a weakling for not wanting to have a work related injury during my first year out of nursing school. I especially despise comments from nurses who say "it is nice to sometimes have a male nurse help move the patients" as if being a man and having more upper body strength does jack for saving your back when you got some huge person falling down onto you!
