Have you had a musculoskeletal disorder (MSD) at your worksite in the last year?
If so, you certainly aren’t alone. They’re the most common and costly type of injury and they occur every day at worksites just like yours.
So why do we continue to struggle with this well-known and costly problem? That’s exactly what a new research review (published last November) sought to uncover.
The researchers reviewed 4,022 articles to identify common challenges to implementing and sustaining MSD prevention programs.
What did they find?
11 barriers to successful MSD prevention programs
Many of the barriers to successfully implementing an MSD prevention program won’t surprise you. But they are worth taking a look at and asking yourself if your worksite struggles with them. It’s a useful self-auditing tool you can use to thoughtfully consider each challenge and honestly assess how big of a challenge it is for your situation.
Let’s take these on one at a time.
Barrier 1: Lack of time
Not surprisingly, a lack of time was frequently identified as a challenge to implementing MSD prevention activities in the workplace. One study indicated ergonomics team members felt their position on the ergonomics team was secondary to their main responsibilities. Another study suggested the onsite staff didn’t have time to be properly trained on ergonomics, therefore dramatically limiting the effectiveness of the program.
Barrier 2: Lack of resources
This will certainly shock no one. Having a lack of resources negatively impacts the effectiveness of implementing MSD prevention control measures. The question to ask, though, is why don’t ergonomics and injury prevention activities get the resources they need? Several studies indicated implementations lacked funding because the organization focused on the short-term price rather than the long-term value. Bingo.
Barrier 3: Lack of communication
Many organizations have a difficult time piecing together the musculoskeletal health disciplines into a complete puzzle. The communication challenge exists at not just the individual level, but also between departmental structures of the organization. Silos and disparate responsibilities for musculoskeletal health activities will prevent the right information getting to the right people at the right time. And it’s hard to act on what you don’t know.
Barrier 4: Lack of management commitment, support, and participation
The literature suggests that extensive support from top management is required to maintain participant motivation and avoid the disconnect of management’s role in the implementation process. Where ergonomics is not viewed as a priority compared to other design parameters or isn’t given the support it needs, it often causes difficulties with employee buy-in to new prevention activities. At that point, almost no one is committed to the MSD prevention process and the heroic efforts of a handful of truly committed stakeholders are unsustainable in the long term.
Barrier 5: Lack of knowledge and training
The literature suggests that many people are misinformed, or completely naive, with respect to MSD hazards in the workplace. Workers are rarely aware of the relation between work and MSD and nearly universally underestimate the risk of accidents at work. Beyond awareness, workers also lacked knowledge of how the implementation of ergonomic interventions would be beneficial to the prevention of strains and other MSDs.
Barrier 6: Resistance to change
There is a resistance to change, in general, that challenges efforts to make improvements to the workplace. Individuals at both the worker and managerial levels are accustomed to their way of doing things. In order for implementations to be accepted and utilized, they must be culturally relevant and involve participation from workers at an early stage.
Barrier 7: Changing work environment
A changing work environment, whether it is due to changes in work location or changes in personnel, provide a challenge to the implementation of ergonomic interventions. In the construction sector, hazards are difficult to identify because workers may face daily changes in location, tools, and tasks. Additionally, the presence of “transient” sub-contractors has been associated with accident rates up to 50% higher than those of contractors.
Barrier 8: Scope of activities
Musculoskeletal health is complex. Most corporate perspectives identified the focus as being reactive instead of a proactive response to workplace ergonomic issues. By targeting only one level of an organization; such as the employees, or isolating individual risk factors; such as reducing heavy lifting, the implemented program does not take into account the complexity of the interaction between individual and organizational factors for health outcomes.
Barrier 9: Lack of trust, fear of job loss or loss of authority
Lack of trust, fear of job loss, or loss of authority are common challenges faced during implementation. One study noted that it is difficult to start the process of an intervention when there is a lack of mutual trust within the organization and between management and workers. Another study observed that workers are often skeptical of employers’ dedication to improving safety in the workplace. Trust plays an integral role in successfully managing musculoskeletal health. It’s a tricky balance to strike. If you do it right, you can create a culture of prevention and safety. If not, it’s very difficult to get that trust back.
Barrier 10: Process deficiencies
Lack of a defined MSD prevention process integrated into the management of the organization as a whole becomes a major deficiency. The process of MSD prevention activities refers to goal setting, planning, and/or controlling, organizing and leading the execution of the activity. This may be informal, follow a Participative Ergonomics (PE) approach, or be based on common management processes such as a Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle. If a prevention program does not fit with the norms and practices already existing in the business, the implementation process will be hampered.
Barrier 11: Difficulty of implementing controls
The literature notes that some changes incorporated into a workplace preventative program are ineffective and that sometimes, inadequate ergonomic techniques and suggestions that do not properly solve the issues are brought forward. This is not surprising given the challenges of a lack of time, resources, and training mentioned above.
Stay tuned …
Understanding these barriers is only valuable to the extent that we can use that understanding to inform a strategy to remove them. Next week we’ll present a management system approach to systematically remove each barrier and discuss the three facilitators of successful MSD prevention programs.
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