In response to most safety hazards, the smart approach to prioritizing control measures is to use the hierarchy of controls.

You are likely familiar with this graphic or graphics similar to it. This is the hierarchy of controls adapted for musculoskeletal disorder (MSD) risks. The most effective control measures sit at the top of the hierarchy and the least effective controls sit at the bottom of the hierarchy.

When you identify a hazard, you want to prioritize the engineering controls at the top of the hierarchy through the ergonomics process. These controls will be the most effective and have the greatest impact on reducing causative risk that leads to MSDs.

This is the correct approach when dealing with an individual MSD hazard that has been identified at your worksite.

Here’s the problem though: if you’re a safety manager and you’re managing the musculoskeletal health of a population of industrial athletes, you aren’t dealing with just one observed MSD hazard. You’re dealing with a whole portfolio of potential MSD hazards.

You’re dealing with perhaps 100 or 200 or 500 or thousands jobs at your site. Each job is made of up a series of tasks, so you have potentially hundreds or thousands of tasks that people do every day that could be MSD hazards, and many of them are likely still unknown and unidentified.

You’re also dealing with 100 or 200 or 500 or thousands of industrial athletes at your site. Each industrial athlete has a musculoskeletal system at varying levels of health at any given point in time.

Musculoskeletal systems are not static, they are always in a state of fatigue vs. recovery and so your employee population’s musculoskeletal health is always changing.

In a perfect world with perfect information, you would immediately know all of the MSD hazards at your site. In a perfect world you would have an unlimited budget to implement engineering controls to eliminate or reduce those risks. In a perfect world, you would have unlimited engineering capacity to immediately implement these improvements.

In a perfect world, MSD hazards for all tasks done by your industrial athletes would be eliminated tomorrow.

The problem is… we don’t live in a perfect world. It’s going to take a long time to engineer out all of the individual risks at your site following the hierarchy of controls.

And that brings us to the most urgent MSD control measure. At any given time, there is some percentage of your population of industrial athletes whose musculoskeletal health is heading toward a musculoskeletal injury and they don’t have time to wait for you to focus exclusively on the top of the hierarchy of controls.

They urgently need a control measure that addresses their actual musculoskeletal system. That is the control measure closest to the thing about to be injured and these control measures can always be implemented immediately and at very low cost.

What we do at ErgoPlus is to provide an onsite certified athletic trainer to manage an industrial athlete program. At any point an industrial athlete experiences abnormal fatigue or discomfort, they have access to a preventive healthcare resource to support them and to help them boost their recovery from work each day, warm-up and make sure they are ready for each work every day, and teach them proper work practices so that they perform their work every day in the healthiest way possible. These control measures are often the most urgent and we implement them immediately while we also work to quantify any MSD hazards present in their job and implement any necessary engineering controls.

So while the hierarchy of controls is a useful model for addressing MSD hazards, always remember that MSDs are multifactorial and if your mission is to prevent them, you need a full range of controls available to you at all times.

While they are the most effective controls, it is a mistake to focus exclusively on engineering controls. You are managing a portfolio of hazards where many of these hazards are currently unknown and unidentified and time is a key factor you have to consider when executing MSD solutions. A robust industrial athlete program is the key to making sure you always have a control method available to you across this wide portfolio of MSD hazards you are managing.

These programs are the foundation of the most successful MSD prevention programs we’ve seen our clients implement, mostly because they provide that immediate baseline control measure while we also work to implement engineering controls for identified hazards.

If you’d like to learn more about industrial athlete programs, we’d love to chat. Go ahead and schedule a free consultation with an Injury Prevention Specialist today, and we’ll talk soon.