On-Demand Webinar: How to Prevent MSDs and Maximize Human Performance with Early Intervention

Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSDs) develop over the course of days, weeks, months and years. This means that the early warning signs of future injuries are present in your workforce today!

So the question is, what are you going to do about it?

This webinar will cover our early intervention strategy for discovering early warning signs of future injuries and putting control measures in place to prevent them.

Enjoy!

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Webinar Transcript

If you’d prefer to read the webinar content or read along with the video, the webinar transcript is provided below for your convenience.

Slide 1

Hey everybody!

Matt Middlesworth here with Ergonomics Plus. Welcome to today’s webinar on How to Prevent MSDs and Maximize Human Performance with Early Intervention.

Slide 2

Our philosophy is that maximum human performance is achieved at the intersection of good workplace design and a healthy, fit and engaged workforce.

Slide 3

This is the Ergonomics Plus philosophy.

Slide 4

And we call our injury prevention methodology for accomplishing maximum human performance for our clients the E+ System. For today’s webinar, I’ll be focusing in on early intervention. But it’s worth mentioning because to get the best results, to best utilize your human capital, you need to have all of these elements of the E+ System working for you. You need to have a solid ergonomics improvement process to improve workplace design. You need to have education and training, and you need to have early intervention to have that healthy, fit and engaged workforce. And you need to have all of that in combination with solid business management with the Establishment and Evaluation elements of the E+ System.

Slide 5

With that said, here’s a look at the agenda for today.

I’ll be covering what early intervention is, how it works and why it’s effective, the benefits of early intervention and then I’ll briefly cover who is best qualified to manage the early intervention piece of your process.

Slide 6

So what is Early Intervention?

Slide 7

Early Intervention is a proactive strategy designed to discover early warning signs of MSDs and prevent them from happening.

Slide8

We know that MSDs are caused by exposure to MSD risk factors, both ergonomic risk factors and individual risk factors, and over time this leads to a musculoskeletal disorder.

Slide 9

So here’s a look at the Fatigue vs. Recovery MSD Curve.

You can see that when an employee is exposed to risk factors, fatigue begins to outrun their body’s recovery system and they start to fatigue.

As more time passes and fatigue outruns recovery, they begin to have more discomfort.

As more time passes, the worker is still exposed to MSD risk factors and fatigue continues to outrun recovery, the worker starts to develop more and more pain.

If nothing is done to correct this pattern, as more time passes, this worker with develop a painful injury, a musculoskeletal disorder.

So an MSD is the result of exposure to risk factors over the course of time – MSDs develop over days, weeks, months and even several years.

Slide 10

Because of this, we know that the next several years’ worth of MSDs are in development and early warning signs of future injuries are present in your workforce today.

Slide 11

This means that more than likely, you have employees who are at various points all along the MSD curve right now.

Slide 12

So when do you want to know about the early signs of an MSD?

When do you want the employee to tell you about their fatigue or discomfort?

Slide 13

And your answer should be that you want to know about the early warning signs as soon as possible!

Slide 14

The earlier the worker reports their fatigue and discomfort, the sooner we can put control measures in place through early intervention and prevent the injury in the first place.

Slide 15

Here is that slide again of the workers at your company who are at some point along the MSD Curve.

Slide16

And this is what will happen over time without an early intervention process in place. Here are your next 15 MSDs. There they are. That’s what happens when you have a completely reactive approach to MSD prevention.

Slide 17

This is what happens when you have an early intervention process in place – when employees are encouraged to report early signs of an MSD and we’re able to put control measures in place to prevent the injury.

That’s what early intervention does.

Slide 18

Here are five steps to the Early Intervention process.

Educate and train, encourage early reports, react positively and respond quickly, conduct early intervention consultations and follow up and report.

Slide 19

The first step is to educate and train your workforce. Employees need to be able to recognize the early warning signs of an MSD. In order to report the early, they need to know what they are.

Employees also need to be trained on injury prevention principles, techniques and best practices.

Slide 20

Some of these injury prevention tools and techniques are listed here.

Preventive warm-up exercises
Proper lifting techniques and body mechanics
Preventive counteractive stretching
Fatigue recovery and sleep
Good health habits ,nutrition, fitness and more.

Slide 21

Employees should HIGHLY encouraged to report early warning signs and know the avenues available to them to report fatigue and discomfort. Whether that’s through a supervisor, safety manager, HR or Ergonomics Plus injury prevention specialist when they make their weekly rounds on the shop floor.

This shows employees that you care about their health and well-being, and goes a long way to creating a prevention culture of safety and wellness.

Slide 22

When you do receive an early report, react over the top positively and respond to the report very quickly. Be over the top and on the hop!

When an employee reports fatigue and discomfort, it is hugely important that the injury prevention specialist gets to that employee to take care of them as early as possible.

Slide 23

When the injury prevention specialist conducts the early intervention consultation, they will listen to the worker and understand the issue they are having, they will review the educated self-care program (the prevention tools and techniques the employee learned during training) and they will also do an objective evaluation of the job for ergonomic risk factors and implement any necessary ergonomic controls to improve the design of the workstation.

Slide 24

So the end result of early intervention should be that there are individual and ergonomic controls implemented to reduce fatigue and increase recovery of the worker.

Slide 25

The injury prevention specialist should follow up with the employee on a weekly basis to keep track of how they’re doing, and they should do that until the issue is fully resolved and the worker is back to peak health and performance.

Slide 26

There are many benefits to putting an early intervention process in place. First of all, it’s really the right thing to do and it shows you care about your employees. If there is fatigue and discomfort out there, you should want to know about it as soon as possible.

Early Intervention will prevent injuries and reduce those associated costs. You will improve your overall health and safety metrics, you’ll create a more healthy, fit and engaged workforce and the benefits of that extend to productivity and product quality improvements.

Slide 27

Here is the slide on human performance again, and it’s worth pointing out again that your goal need to be good workplace design that fits the capabilities and limitations of people and you need a healthy, fit and engaged workforce.

Early intervention is an important piece of that equation. It’s a very hands on approach to human performance and the weekly dedication of an injury prevention specialist and human performance expert is vital to the process.

Slide 28

You might be thinking that all of this sounds great, but you’re wondering who is going to be in charge of this.

Slide 29

At Ergonomics Plus, we use workplace Athletic Trainers to manage this process. All of our clients get weekly visits from our injury prevention specialists and they manage early intervention.

Slide 30

Athletic Trainers are allied healthcare professionals specifically trained in injury prevention and human performance. So Athletic Trainers are injury prevention specialists and human performance experts, and their traditional setting is in sports. Every sports team has an Athletic Trainer as part of their staff to keep their athletes from getting hurt and to keep them on the field, playing at a high level of performance.

Slide 31

These skills translate really well into the workplace because there are a lot of similarities between professional sports athletes and workplace athletes.

Pro sports athletes use their bodies to perform work. Workplace Athletes use their bodies to perform work.

Slide 32

Pro sports athletes get paid to do work with their bodies. Workplace athletes get paid to do work with their bodies.

Slide 33

Pro sports athletes need to perform at a high level. Workplace athletes need to perform at a high level.

Slide 34

Sports teams have an Athletic Trainer on staff to keep their athletes at peak health and maximum human performance. Companies need to have an Athletic Trainer on site to keep their workers at peak health and maximum human performance.

Slide 35

Back in 1989 when Ergonomics Plus was founded, Athletic Training in the workplace was a new concept, but it’s becoming much more common today as leading companies like Schneider Electric, Dupont, Grainger, GE, Boeing and countless others are recognizing the benefits of healthy, fit and engaged workers and the role Athletic Trainers can play in making that happen.

Slide 36

So Athletic Trainers are a great fit in the workplace, managing the early intervention process and educating and training workers.

Slide 37

So to wrap things up, this webinar was on the early intervention part of the E+ System and it’s important to keep in mind that all of these elements of the system get better and are more effective when they’re implemented together in a comprehensive approach to injury prevention and human performance.

Slide 38

As always, if you have any questions about this webinar or need help with anything else, feel free to get in touch with me. You can shoot me an email at matt@ergo-plus.com or connect with @ErgoPlus on Twitter.

Thanks for watching!