On the second day of Industrial Ergonomics, my favorite safety crew gave to me….tips on creating a world-class injury prevention program and a $15 Target gift card!
Welcome back to DORN’s 12 Days of Ergonomics, a blog series where we’re exploring some of today’s most important safety topics while giving away daily prizes for our readers!
Remember: For your chance to win the daily prize, share this blog on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, or TikTok and tag the DORN Companies account so we can record your submission. For extra entries, you can share each day’s blog on multiple social media platforms and tag your friends and colleagues in the safety world.
The winner from Day 1 of the 12 Days of Ergonomics is Thomas Johnston, who did an incredible job and added some humor. Check out his post!
Today’s prize: a $15 Target Gift Card!
Today’s blog addresses a topic that should interest all safety professionals, regardless of their industry or organization size: developing a world-class injury prevention program.
4 Proven Elements of a World-Class Injury Prevention Program
At DORN, multiple decades of experience working directly with employers and their workforces across industries have taught us a few things about the foundational ingredients of a successful safety program.
- Athletic Trainer/Nurse Triage: An underrated element of injury prevention is getting a solid assessment of an incident before it’s escalated to an external health care provider, which triggers all sorts of direct and indirect costs. Integrating a triage program that uses expertise from certified athletic trainers or nurses, either on-site or available by 24-hour hotline, allows employers to define the severity of an injury or instance of work-related pain and determine the best course of action. This can save you tens of thousands of dollars by providing immediate resources for care for minor injuries while escalating those that need more substantial treatment. At DORN, we’ve discovered that some 87% of cases can be handled with on-site first aid.
- Motion Capture Technology: Next, we recommend integrating tech that can assess biomechanical motion and technique at the level of the individual worker. This provides detailed data to help make functional evaluations of movements and task techniques that lead to injury risk. It’s also a great way to reinforce training and observation done by specialists and supervisors at your facilities, backing up what they see with hard data. Finally, the data you collect can be used for predictive analysis, helping you get ahead of risk by addressing it at the source.
- Pain Management: A key component of early symptom intervention, pain management is critical for keeping employees engaged in their work while limiting the number of lost days and workers’ comp claims. Using non-OSHA-recordable pain management sessions conducted by a certified therapist can alleviate symptoms and greatly reduce the need for outside health care providers and costly treatment.
- Emotional Ergonomics: Finally, the latest research, including a DORN white paper on the topic, indicates that connecting physical risk to emotional load is the missing link in injury prevention. Research shows that 52% of workplace injuries have a root cause related to emotional or psychosocial factors like stress, fear, burnout, or pressure. Treating physical pain and emotional stress as co-signals can help you create a more holistic program that addresses all facets of the worker’s experience. This can lead to lower stress levels, which in turn correlate to lower fatigue, less chronic pain, and lower injury risks.
Thank you for joining us for the 12 Days of Ergonomics! Remember to share this post on social media and tag the DORN account for your chance to win a $15 Target gift card!
