Kingsley Flett
My interest in back injury prevention began at age 19 years when I seriously injured my lower back while working on a balance-tank valve in a swimming complex. Looking back on the incident, with 30 odd years of professional experience, I’ve concluded that the technical cause of my injury was ‘being an idiot’.
At the time I also concluded that I’d be less of an idiot if I went to university. The motivation to rehabilitate the injury and stop it from ever happening again guided much of my study – the structure and function of the spine was my major area of interest through a bachelors and master’s degree in Human Movement at the University of Western Australia.
After a stint in the WA Fire Brigade in 1986; the light bulb moment came while working as a rehabilitation counsellor for SECWA in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. Seeing the same people come back time and time again with recurring injuries, I reasoned that there were a lot of other idiots out there who needed help – there was a need for a teaching system that could be used in injury prevention and rehabilitation that would create lasting change in people’s habits.
The Strong Spine system began in 1993 and in the last 24 years : Oil rig workers, miners, farmers, drillers, customs officers, policemen, nurses, soldiers, grave-diggers, plumbers, mechanical fitters, electricians, carpenters, diesel fitters, chefs, fishermen and divers are but a few of the hundreds of thousands of people who have benefited from the training across Australia, New Zealand and India.
I’ve also learned to apply my knowledge of spinal biomechanics to my favorite sport – Disc Golf. I’ve twice been Australian Masters Tour champion and was selected in the Australian team in 2016. This proves that anyone can represent their country if they choose a small enough sport.
Kieran Bell
I now have almost 30 years of experience in the health sector as a physio, working in OHS, here in Australia and abroad.
Many approaches to OHS have piqued my interest over this period. However, with experience, I have come to more fully understand their limitations and each has subsequently been moderated to mean something different to me now.
Here are just a few:
- Cure all pain and injury management approaches – there is no panacea for pain. There is nuance in all injuries due to the nature and experience of the person injured.
- Ergonomics: the supposed silver bullet for injury prevention – It’s nice to make working life easier but don’t think this will lower your LTIs as a stand-alone intervention. Much of safety is behavioral, not just mechanical. Teaching people to understand where their pitfalls are at work and how to focus on that is where the data tells us we are more likely to lower injury incidence.
- You get what you measure: risk management can become a numbers game: forces, distances, heights, repetitions, etc. Quantifying the metrics in a workplace can give the impression of control. But beware, I have learned this– be careful what you incentivize. Reducing a workplace to a series of numbers can lead you to take your eyes off the nature of most injury set ups which lie in the whole person in that workplace and the decisions they make.
- Fear makes us irrational. Fear of pain and injury sits behind many unhelpful beliefs in industry (and health) that could be worsening your injury stats. For example, load and repetition generate wear and tear and end up causing arthritis; we now know load makes us stronger and movement is good for joints. The devil is in the detail, a lot of the causes of injury are actually in how we move and how well we recover, rather than how heavy or how often we lift.
