Simple, Not Easy

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(Video Transcript) Musculoskeletal Disorders: Known Risks, Known Solutions

If you’re involved in the safety profession at all, you’re likely very familiar with the problem of musculoskeletal disorders or MSDs.

And that’s because MSDs are the most common and costly injury in the workplace today. They’re the largest injury category, accounting for a third of all recordable injuries.

For employers, these are extremely expensive injuries. The average strain costs over $30,000 in direct medical costs, and about another $34,000 in indirect costs – things like lost productivity, legal expenses, lost time, and – as you’re well aware as a safety manager – increased administrative time and hassle. So that’s over $64,000 for a single injury, which gets very costly for employers.

For industrial athletes, these injuries can be quite devastating and lead to a downward spiral in a person’s life. MSDs are the leading cause of disability, which can dramatically reduce the quality of life and the ability to provide for someone’s family.

With both the costs of healthcare and the age of the working population rising, the problem of MSDs is going to be around for a while. The cost and severity of these injuries could rise over the next decade as these trends play out.

But here’s the good news: the causative risk factors leading to MSDs are well-known and the control measures for them are readily available to you. It’s just up to you to implement them and take ownership of the outcomes.

This can seem overwhelming at first because MSD injuries are complex and multifactorial, but here’s a very simple way to think about it.

The field of ergonomics looks at the interaction between the work and the worker. We know from the research into the development of MSDs that both the work and the worker bring risks into this interaction.

Workplace risk factors are things that put increased stress on the musculoskeletal system: so things like high force requirements, awkward postures, repetitive motion, contact stress, impact stress, high vibration, and cold temperatures.

We also can’t forget about the risk factors the worker brings into the interaction. For one, they are bringing their unique musculoskeletal system into this interaction and so their age, gender, and overall musculoskeletal health are factors. It’s their musculoskeletal system at stake and so how well they can prepare it for work, how well they use it at work, and how well they can recover it when they go home from work are all key factors in musculoskeletal health outcomes.

So what your ergonomics process should be doing is looking at these very well-known and researched risk factors, and putting control measures in place at each stage of the interaction.

Engineering controls address the work environment – the physical worksite and equipment.

Administrative controls address how work gets done.

And Industrial Athlete Controls address how workers prepare and recover from work.

Engineering controls ensure the workplace is designed to fit the worker’s capabilities and that the correct ergonomic equipment is provided to do the job well.

Administrative controls include things like job rotation, team lifting guidelines, and proper body mechanics and work methods.

Industrial athlete controls include things like warm-up stretching programs, early intervention, and work recovery programs.

Providing control measures at each stage of the interaction is the key to addressing a problem like MSDs, which are multifactorial and occur over a longer period of time. We call this prevention strategy the ErgoPlus System. Implementing this process is not easy, but it is relatively straightforward. Clients implementing the ErgoPlus System prevent MSDs in a consistent, predictable way because they are able to implement known solutions to known risks.

So, in summary, MSDs have known risks and known solutions, you just have to put a process in place to implement engineering, administrative, and industrial athlete control measures to prevent them. We call this the ErgoPlus System. Simple, but not easy.