Strains and Slips and Sprains and Trips — Oh My!
- By Robert Pater
- Mar 01, 2024
Want a good way to harness moving from bad trailing to better leading? Utilize recent statistical analysis to wake and shake up your organization to make better moves towards higher level Safety performance.
While you might be familiar with Liberty Mutual Business Insurance’s annual Workplace Safety Index, which “compiles the top 10 causes of the most serious disabling workplace injuries,” are you also aware of the Travelers Insurance 2023 Injury Impact Report? This latter document analyzed more than 1.2 million workers compensation claims submitted from 2016 through 2020. The data is based on lost time claims from those accident years.”
Reported results, according to Rich Ives, Travelers’ Vice-President of Workers Compensation Claims: “The Injury Impact Report also looked at some of the most common causes of injury, with overexertion taking the top spot (29 percent of claims analyzed), which could include strains or injuries resulting from twisting, reaching, lifting or jumping. The second most frequent were slips, trips and falls (23 percent), followed by being struck by an object (13 percent), motor vehicle accidents (5 percent), and caught-in or caught-between hazards (5 percent).”
It is no surprise that both Liberty and Travelers’ concurred that soft-tissue injuries and slips, trips and falls far and away continue to lead the league in Safety problems. But rather than being a wake-up call for some leaders, this can actually turn into a lull-inducing “no big deal.” When a problem has existed over a long period of time — and when leaders believe they’ve already “tried everything” — it can be easy to become complacent, to think there’s nothing that can be done to really move the needle, that it’s a regrettably (unhappy) fact of life that these problems are inevitable and unfixable.
And then to effectively give up on trying to really make a difference. To default to doing the same things (or basically minor variations on what’s been tried) that haven’t really/sustainably reduced these injuries, to write them off as “a cost of doing business,” to attempt to over-rely on basically “willpower” methods to cut these injuries (making corporate pledges, appealing to “reason,” motivating through rewards or punishment, etc.) or to even blame workers or Safety leaders out of frustration. Seen it, time and again. Yet soft-tissue injuries and slips/trips/falls still prevail.
This article originally appeared in the February/March 2024 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.