“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” – Benjamin Franklin
It’s clear that prevention is better than treatment. If given the choice, nobody would ever choose to have a painful musculoskeletal disorder that requires surgery or prescription medications with potentially disastrous side effects.
Preventing the injury makes much more sense. It’s better for the person and better for the company.
Having an ergonomics improvement process and robust education and training for everyone at your facility goes a long way to remove MSD risk factors and prevent MSDs. It’s necessary to have these parts of your MSD prevention process in place.
However, whenever workers use their bodies to perform a job, they are inherently at risk for developing an MSD. Their bodies experience daily fatigue, and if this fatigue outpaces their body’s recovery system it causes a muscular imbalance, eventually leading to an MSD.
Because MSDs develop over the course of time, the early warning signs (fatigue and discomfort) of future injuries are present in your workforce today.
So what makes the difference between early warning signs developing into an MSD verses the worker returning to peak health?
The Critical Difference – One-on-One Early Intervention Consultations
A one-on-one consultation with an injury prevention specialist is a powerful way to prevent injuries. Early intervention is a strategy designed to discover early warning signs of MSDs and prevent the early warning signs from developing into an injury.
(For more on how early intervention works, read A Safety Manager’s Guide to Early Intervention)
An early intervention consultation has three parts:
- Listen to the employee and understand the problems they are having.
- Review the self-care program for the employee and make them aware of the prevention tools available to them.
- Evaluate the job and remove any causative risk factors present through the ergonomics improvement process and implementing ergonomic controls.
Let’s take these on one at a time to understand why early intervention can be the difference between an MSD and a healthy, productive worker.
1. Listen to the employee and understand the problems they are having.
When the injury prevention specialist is notified of an early report of fatigue and discomfort, they should respond quickly and positively. The first step is to listen to the employee and understand their specific situation. It is also helpful in many cases to watch the worker performing their job.
The initial consultation should answer two basic questions about what risk factors are contributing to this worker’s fatigue and discomfort.
- Are there any individual risk factors present? (Using poor work practices, has a poor health profile, physical fitness, nutrition habits, etc.)
- Are there any ergonomic risk factors present in the employee’s workstation? (Force, repetition, awkward postures.)
Understanding the root cause of the issue will inform the prevention process and plan of action to remove risk factors.
2. Review self-care program and injury prevention tools.
Once the injury prevention specialist has a grasp on the causative risk factors contributing to fatigue and discomfort, they will review the self-care program with the employee. This one-on-one time spent training the employee reinforces group education sessions and empowers the employee to take care of their bodies.
Prevention tools and techniques available to all employees:
- Preventive warm-up exercises
- Proper lifting techniques
- Proper body mechanics
- Identification of ergonomics improvement opportunities
- Preventive counteractive stretching exercises
- Proper resting/sleeping posture
- Strengthening exercises
- Fatigue recovery and sleep
- Proper nutrition and hydration
- Good health habits
- Personal fitness and wellness
3. Evaluate the job for causative ergonomic risk factors.
An objective ergonomic assessment of the workstation should be conducted to determine if ergonomic risk factors are present.
If it is determined that there are ergonomic risk factors, ergonomic controls (engineering and/or administrative controls) should be implemented to remove the incompatibilities between the work and the worker.
Rinse and Repeat – Follow up on a weekly basis
The injury prevention specialist should follow up with the employee on a weekly basis to evaluate the progress of the employee’s situation and continue to reduce causative risk factors.
These follow up visits should be conducted until the worker returns to peak health.
Conclusion
A one-on-one consultation with an injury prevention specialist is a powerful way to prevent injuries. Also, by providing employees with an injury prevention specialist (workplace athletic trainer) to conduct these consultations, you are putting a last line of defense in place to prevent injuries.
This is good for your business and great for your people. Think prevention.
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