A Total Musculoskeletal Health Initiative accelerates health and safety excellence and drives measurable value for your organization.
As we’ve been covering in our latest blog series, the Total Musculoskeletal Health approach integrates health protection with health promotion into a single strategy to advance worker well-being. The four areas of focus for effective Total Musculoskeletal Health initiatives are: protect, promote, prevent, and perform.
Protect
Optimize the work environment to match the capabilities and limitations of people through the art and science of ergonomics.
Promote
Deliver preventive healthcare upstream to promote musculoskeletal health where it drives better outcomes and the highest value on your investment.
Prevent
Shift the focus from treatment to prevention, transforming musculoskeletal health from a cost center to a profit center.
Perform
Unlock the human potential of your organization by giving people the opportunity to do their best work.
This is the new, proactive, prevention-focused approach to musculoskeletal health. View the graphic below to learn more.
Shift Your Focus to Prevention
The old, traditional approach to musculoskeletal health was to reactively treat injuries as they occur, like they are a necessary cost of doing business.
This treatment model is failing. It fails people who work hard for a living and it fails organizations who collectively spend over $1 billion per week treating musculoskeletal injuries.
Over a third of worker’s compensation dollars are spent treating unnecessary musculoskeletal injuries. Because a third or more of your health and safety losses are likely related to musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs), it logically follows that a substantial portion of your investment in health and safety controls should be allocated to MSD prevention.
Taking an integrated, total approach to musculoskeletal health helps you earn an outsized return on your investment in prevention. This approach is simply the most effective way to prevent MSDs.
Maintaining peak musculoskeletal health is, simply put, all about decreasing fatigue and increasing recovery. It’s about protecting the musculoskeletal system to decrease fatigue and promoting musculoskeletal health to increase recovery.
By committing to this constant process of decreasing fatigue and increasing recovery throughout your employee population, you can predictably lower injury risk and prevent injuries.
Drive Human Performance
Not only does an integrated approach to musculoskeletal health prevent injuries, but it’s also a practical way to improve productivity and engage workers more fully in their work.
Improved productivity through the ergonomics improvement process
The presence of ergonomic risk factors — awkward postures, excessive force, and high task repetition — makes a job more frustrating and difficult to perform. This causes a variety of problems including losses in productivity.
The ergonomics improvement process reduces ergonomic risk factors and improves the interaction between the work and the worker. Done well, this process removes barriers to productivity and makes job tasks easier and faster to accomplish.
Improved productivity through a healthier, more engaged workforce
Among the many benefits of an integrated approach listed by NIOSH, here are a few that illustrate the impact this program can have on engaging your workforce:
“Employees with Better Well-Being…
- … Create a happier, less stressful, and better work environment.
According to a survey by Aon Hewitt, the National Business Group on Health, and the Futures Company, employees who reported having a strong culture of health at work were more likely to report being happy, less likely to report that stress has a negative impact on their work, and less likely to cite the work environment as an obstacle to health…. Enjoy their jobs more, stay in their jobs longer.
Employees who feel supported by their employers are more likely to want to keep their jobs and will help attract and retain the best employees. A study by the World Economic Forum found that 64% of employees who reported that their workplaces were active promoters of health intended to stay with their companies at least five years.… Are good for business.
Companies that have exemplary safety, health, and environmental programs outperformed the S&P 500 by between 3% and 5%.… Are more engaged.
Employers that have high employee engagement performed better than employers with low employee engagement in profitability, customer ratings, turnover, safety incidents, productivity, and quality. Engagement includes feeling like someone at work cares about the employee as a person and having the materials needed to do work right.”
Stay Tuned
This is an installment of the Total Musculoskeletal Health series. Stay tuned for next week’s article on how to get started with Total Musculoskeletal Health. Sign up here to make sure you don’t miss out.
