What can we take from the recent WorkSafe Western Australia data?
“The worst hazard group is manual handling. These injuries account for 40 per cent of all lost time.”
Department of Energy, Mines, Industry Regulation and Safety
Looking at the data over a recent 10 years in Western Australia we can see that current strategies on injury prevention are not making a huge impact. 40% of all lost time is accounted for by manual handling injuries. The next closest category is trips at a distant 17%.
When Alf Nachemson, orthopedic spinal surgeon and founder of the Cochrane review system was quoted as saying, “ergonomics as a standalone intervention is not effective as an injury prevention strategy” he was reflecting on data from recent findings of a large multi year study alongside Volvo in the 1980s. In this study his biomechanics department had helped Volvo redesign their entire production plant based on a ergonomic principles to find no change in their pain reporting or injury data on follow-up some time later.
There is always going to be a behavioral aspect to injury and its not a conscious behavioral effect from what we see. How we move at work, how we store and accumulate tension in our body and how we manage this long term will largely define how well we fair in manual handling tasks. These things are not easy to teach, hard to instill and are dependent on solid habit formation. This is our wheelhouse at Strong Spine. 30 years of teaching people how to move and how to recover has given us insight into how to make lasting changes in behavior. Our programs incorporate experiential learning and recruit intrinsic motivational factors to make habits stick that are going to lower personal risk of injury.
30 years of teaching people how to move and how to recover has given us insight into how to make lasting changes in behavior.
