The Devil Is In The Details

MAKE-IT-SAFE MONDAY

When people are working jobs that require a lot of physical labor, back injuries are very common.  You probably know how injuries, especially back injuries, can affect the work place, creating problems with workers compensation, loss of labor, and delays in production or distribution.  But these back injuries are hurting more than the businesses.  They are really hurting the people affected by them.  This is usually forgotten about when looking into nameless, faceless statistical data.

A study was done by Judith A. Turner, Ph.D. of the University of Washington, Seattle, which was published in the Journal Spine.  Turner and her colleagues did a study where they performed interviews with 1,885 workers who submitted a workers’ compensation claim due to back injury.  They analyzed a wide range of factors including medical, job-related and psychological factors, that could contribute to having the disability at one year after the injury.  Not surprisingly, workers with a more severe injury were more likely to be disabled after a year.  They said that workers who had pain spreading down to their leg, indicating involvement of the spinal nerve roots, or radiculopathy, were at a higher risk.  They said those who visited the chiropractor were less likely to be out for longer periods of time.  

The study done by Dr. Turner and her colleagues became 88% accurate on predicting if a new back injury was going affect the person for a year plus or not.  Dr. Turner stressed the importance of avoiding the injury from the start.  She suggested the use of inventions that would help to eliminate some of the heavy lifting.  With people utilizing these inventions it would help out the businesses and the people working for them.

Contributed by Dale Bromenshenkel, 

Demand Generation Specialist, Ergologistics

Studies such as these can provide workers and their companies clear weapons to fight the epidemic presence of work place injury.  Paying attention to these studies can root out the "devil" and clearly identify statistics that can lead to a common cure.  In essence, let's not let the injuries of myriads of workers throughout time go in vain. It has once been morbidly said, "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic."  In an attempt to re-quote this for relevance, "EVERY worker injury is tragedy, and a million worker injuries is ignorant insanity."  We can do better. A lot better.

Thank you for your time and attention.  Let's make it safe this Monday.

Aaron M. Lamb
President, Ergologistics