How to prevent muscle strains?
I wanted to get some ideas on how to prevent muscle strains in the workplace. By far this is the most common type of incident in my workplace. Even if an employee is doing routine maintenance safely, all it takes is one awkward angle to cause a strain. One idea that came to mind to help prevent this type of incident is implementing a stretch at shift starts. Anyone have any other ideas? I'm guessing this is incredibly common across all industries.
Comments (11)
So here's a list of ways to prevent muscle strains in the workplace:
1) As you mentioned Implement a Pre-Shift Warm up (5 min stretch routine). Also encourage "micro-stretches" throughout the day. This is where employees target muscles of high usage and perform opposite-motion stretching to keep proper blood-flow to the tissue.
2) Incentivize your employees to follow an exercise program aimed at stretching and strengthening muscles
3)Incentivize a healthy body weight. Obesity can stress muscles, especially in your legs and back. Getting employees to be fit, will minimize the risk of strain.
4) Train your employees on good posture and safe lifting techniques (maybe even do drills at your new hire orientation/ periodically)
5) Use an ergonomic evaluation tool to figure out jobs which have high risk, and implement a corrective action to reduce the risk of those tasks.
6) Proper Hydration and nutrition are also important. You could program in some sort of water breaks for employees.
7) Incentivize reporting of tasks which cause discomfort or pain to the operators - hitting these pre-emptively will reduce the risk of them turning into a full-blown musculo-skeletal disorder like a sprain or strain.
Have you done an injury trend analysis for the past years to find out your common problem? Maybe can help you find other tools, equipment or procedures/training that can help bring awareness to these situations. You can also bring in an ergo expert to come in and do an ergo assessment. They can usually provide valuable recommendations.
Here is a link to a guidance document that has some useful information on this
topic.
https://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/indg143.pdf
The incentive list is a good one. Stretching certainly does help, along with hydration. What I had done in the past with my groups, I brought in a massage therapist to go over the muscle groups and how to prevent strain and sprains. The therapist tailored the talk, program, for the specific group. It was well received and I noticed improvements where we had had some issues.