Preventing Soft-tissue Injuries
- By Robert Pater
- Sep 01, 2022
These are times where the heartbeat of the world’s economy seems to be uncontrollably fibrillating. And with this come psychosocial stressors that can disrupt the pulse of many.
This cascades into safety. Not just mentally, but physically as well. Yet, it’s easy for many leaders to default towards trying to do what they’ve been doing, a “stay-the-course” mindset, especially when it comes to preventing continually plaguing soft-tissue injuries (i.e. strains-sprains/musculo-skeletal disorders/cumulative trauma disorders, etc.).
Here, a too-common “keep on keeping on” leadership mindset tends towards engineering out physical contributing forces to these injuries. While doing this is part of a strong approach, narrowly fixating only or mostly on physical factors hasn’t moved the needle. You know the strategies: emphasizing redesign and repositioning, tool replacement, load minimization, automating tasks, software task analysis, enhanced personal protective equipment (such as skeletal assists), exercises for work hardening, etc.
I appreciate why leaders default to this. After all, most soft-tissue injuries seem caused by concrete physical actions (well, or in some cases, by inactivity.) It’s understandably easier to do something that impacts what you can readily see. And investing in physical equipment is so tangible. Plus, physical interventions are readily monitorable.
But what’s “easier” to see and affect doesn’t necessarily equate to being maximally effective. Just look at the disturbingly constant history of safety statistics (Liberty Mutual’s yearly Workplace Safety Index, which charts costs of disabling/lost-time injuries or the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which monitors numbers of incidents). Soft-tissue injuries continue to reign as the undisputed king of costs and numbers of incidents, over as many years as you’d care to review (consistently followed by slips, trips and falls—which can be related).
Recently, there seems to be heightened emphasis on soft-tissue injury prevention—perhaps in part driven by concerns of leaders in the supply chain sector, where strains and sprains dominate and worker retention and performance have become increasingly problematic. Redoubling attention to preventing these injuries is good—as long as leaders don’t fall into the rut of doing the same old things, expecting different results.
This article originally appeared in the September 1, 2022 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.