This article reports on an assessment of back pain and associated factors undertaken with nursing staff on nine NHS hospital wards and two private wards. One hundred and sixty eight nurses completed a confidential, retrospective questionnaire. The results suggest that despite the implementation of the 1992 EC manual handling operations regulations, back pain among nurses still remains a problem and is often due to the cumulative effects of work pressures. There is little evidence that training in manual handling reduces the prevalence of back pain directly, since the factors influencing the occurrence of back pain are complex.