Tuning in Safety Reception
Workers can improve their self-monitoring to help prevent strains and sprains.
- By Robert Pater
- Sep 06, 2023
Have you noted that psychosocial factors have recently been acknowledged as having significant contributors to prevalent strains and sprains? Finally! Such soft-tissue injuries continue to lead the league as all-time champion in lost-time costs, according to Liberty Mutual’s Workplace Safety Index (of whatever year you wish to randomly look up.)
Many noted sources are now going beyond a bias of “just control those physical forces that produce strains and sprains.” Perhaps this change is a matter of “Frustration is the father of invention?” That opening up consideration of the impact of psychosocial factors comes from having “tried everything” but still not being able to significantly reduce soft-tissue injuries?
I think of psychosocial forces as basically those that are “within” — one, both inside people (perception of trust and being valued, stress responses, social support, default habits, resistance to/openness to change, and two, within the organization (“culture”), including leadership styles, communications, amount and kinds of engagement, level of staffing provided/workload expected, supervisors’ ability, other stressors the organization places on or allows to exist — and much more.
While forms of psychosocial forces likely affect every relationship — cultural, work, or personal relationship — these have been documented as significant contributors to strains and sprains. For example, in 2021, the official European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) published “Musculoskeletal Disorders: Association With Psychosocial Risk Factors At Work,” which overviewed 53 double-blind studies. It concluded, “The review demonstrated that there is clear evidence that psychosocial risk factors play a causal role in the development of musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) in the workplace. They do not act in isolation, but their effect combines with (and often exacerbates) the effects of physical risk factors.”
In the United States, NIOSH agreed: “There is increasing evidence that psychosocial factors related to the job and work environment play a role in the development of work-related musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) of the upper extremity and back.”
While there are complex, multifactorial such contributors — and numerous ways to address these — we’ve repeatedly seen from our work in preventing these soft-tissue (and other related) injuries over longer than 35 years that there’s a tangible “mental” skill that most people can quickly improve that helps harness the psychosocial realm towards prevention, and away from piling up into strains and sprains: tuning up self-monitoring.
This article originally appeared in the September 2023 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.