Many people may not realise that workplace related sprain and strain injuries are a really
huge problem across the state. In actual fact, of the eighty-five thousand plus workplace
injuries in Queensland each year, more than sixty percent are sprain and strain injuries.
What’s even more concerning is that this problem isn’t even going away, it’s getting
worse. And many of these injuries could have been easily prevented.
Sure we realise each workplace is unique, and as such there’s no one size fits all
solutions to prevent these type of injuries. But as you’ll see in this film there are
some practical, simple and relatively inexpensive things you can do in your workplace to help
reduce your risk of sprain and strain injuries.
Anything that involves physical exertion, I would say is a manual task.
It’s a job that requires human effort.
Lifting manually by yourself, without the cranes and that.
Anything using your hands or…
Packing pallets. Loading pallets. Unloading pallets and all that sort of stuff.
A lot of people think manual tasks is just about heavy lifting and carrying. But there’s
loads more to it than that, if you’ll pardon the pun.
Manual tasks are those workplace activities that require the use of force exerted by a
person to grasp, manipulate, strike, throw, carry, move – as in lift/lower/push/pull,
hold or restrain an object, load or body part. Phew!!
A sprain or strain is a term that doctors use when they’re talking about something
that’s not broken. So it’s a soft tissue injury and that doesn’t mean it’s not
serious and doesn’t mean it’s going to get better quickly because often they don’t.
Most people I see are not from heavy lifting, the sprains and strains are more from accumulative
effect of the work duties that they do. Which might include doing things repetitively, or
doing things that are forceful and also if they do them for a long time during the course
of the day.
I was actually in the process of lifting a sixty kilogram cake, which is a compressed,
washed linen and I realised pretty well straight away that there was a problem.
When I was younger, I worked hard. I was one of the boys. Let’s get into, let’s get
it done.
The pain was pretty bad. It was something I’ve never experienced before.
And it all added up that when I got older then this injury I’ve got is going to be
with me for the rest of my life.
Half of the problem with sprain and strain injuries is that people think they’re a
bit of a non-issue, but many of them are very serious and can have a huge impact.
It impacts you on doing your activities in daily living that you need to do. Also what
you might need to do in your workplace.
The biggest impact of this injury has been the change to my lifestyle.
It was painful enough… painful enough to stop me from doing some of the normal duties
that I was before that.
I can’t do sport anymore, that’s just a no-no. I used to enjoy doing cricket umpiring.
Not on. I can’t stand out in the field. Activities with the family, not on. Maintenance
around the house, I can’t do that.
There is an economic impact that they’re not making as much money as what they would
if they were at work. And then that then can cause them a lot of stress and stress on the
family, and on the children as well. And then that can lead further on to marriage breakdown,
people losing their house. And that’s not an uncommon thing.
Painkillers, well they’re a part of life now whether I like it or not, I’ve got
to take them. If I don’t take them well then everybody else suffers for it because
sometimes I’m not a nice person to get along with.
I got off pretty easily I think when compared to other people.
I would never had thought in a hundred years that I would suffer from this so much.
I think about how lucky I’ve been all the time. You know, I think of how much worse
it could have been.
A sprain or a strain not only affects the injured worker, but it can have a serious
impact on the workplace too.
Well it affects everything. All the other workers, because they’re left to take up
the slack and probably have to work that bit harder until you can organise replacements
and that sort of thing. Depending on the level of worker, obviously, if it’s someone who’s
been here a while you lose a lot of knowledge. Managers then of course tend to pull their
hair out because their production’s out of whack. So once your production’s down,
your finances obviously and given the way economics are at the moment that’s not a
good thing for any industry to have to cope with.
It’s good to see something that’s actually suable and understandable, even for people
like me. And that you can include the guys down the back.
Although a lot of workplace activities are manual tasks, not all of them are likely to
cause an injury. There’s heaps of ways to identify which manual tasks are risky and
what you can do about them. While some risk assessment tools can appear complex, I’m
going to walk you through a simple and really practical tool that you can use in your workplace.
It’s called PErforM. At the risk of scaring you off it stands for: Participative Ergonomics
For Manual Tasks. Yep, that’s a bit of a mouthful so let’s break it down into some
simple steps. By the way be sure to checkout the user friendly PErforM handbook for a more
detailed explanation. The first thing you need to do to start managing
your manual tasks risks is to work out what high risk manual tasks you actually have in
your workplace. So how do you go about this? You could talk
to your workers to find out what tasks they don’t like doing because they’re difficult
or cause them physical pain. If you see tasks where workers have made improvisations such
as standing on boxes and the like to reach things, this might also indicate that there’s
a problem. You should also take a look around your workplace, even video various tasks so
you can watch them later and assess which tasks may be risky. But to do this you’ll
need to know what risk factors that you’re looking for in the first place.
There are five risk factors that directly stress the body. These are forceful exertions,
awkward and static postures, vibration, repetition, and duration. These are discussed in more
detail in the handbook, but just briefly: Forceful exertions are about the amount of
physical effort needed to do the job. The more effort required to do the task the higher
the risk of an injury because the muscles get tired.
Awkward and static postures is the next risk factor. Awkward postures occur when parts
of the body move away from a comfortable neutral position. For example, the neutral position
for the hand and wrist is the handshake position and the more you bend or twist it, the more
awkward or uncomfortable it becomes. Static postures refer to postures where a
part of or the whole body is kept in the same position for a long period of time.
Repetition means making the same types of movements over and over again.
Duration relates to the amount of time it takes to do a task without a break. Duration
becomes a risk if the task is done for more than an hour at a time.
The last of the five risk factors is vibration, and there are two types. The first is whole
body vibration, which normally results from sitting or standing on a vibrating surface,
for example, a forklift, dozer, tractor or platform. Hand-arm vibration is caused by
holding on to vibrating equipment such as grinders, drills or jackhammers. This is particularly
risky if the equipment isn’t maintained properly.
Okay, just to check, can you identify the risk factors in the following scenes?
If you’ve identified (a) as being an example of repetition, (b) as vibration, (c) as awkward
and static postures, (d) as duration, and (e) as forceful exertion. Then you’ve got
five out of five. Now that you know what the five risk factors
are, you’ll find it much easier to identify the tasks in your workplace that have a higher
risk of sprain or strain injuries. Once you’ve spotted the task to improve, the next thing
to do is to work your way through the three steps of the PErforM risk assessment tool.
The first of these steps is to talk to your workers to gather the background information
that you’ll need to complete worksheet one, which is at the back of the handbook.
The next step is to fill out worksheet two, which you’ll also find at the back of the
handbook. The first thing to do here is to work out
what parts of the body are affected by the task that’s being performed. Again, you
should ask your workers about where they feel sore or tired after performing a task. Or
you can observe them performing the task to see if any of the other risk factors we talked
about earlier are there. Now you need to mark these affected areas on the body map on worksheet
two. If you think that several parts of the body have the same risk, for example the hand
and wrist, you can group them together. If you’re unsure, just rate each body part
separately. If you decide to assess more than one body part or group, you can mark them
on the body map in different colours to keep better track of them.
The second part to completing worksheet two is to rate each risk factor. This is done
separately for each part of the body that you identified on the body map. The rating
scale is from one to five and the higher the rating the higher the risk.
The third and final step at this point is to identify suitable controls for the risks
in the tasks that rated the highest.
From someone who’s had a lot to do with heavy manual tasks, I guess, it’s certainly
easy to use and it’s quick. It really is fast. It allows buy-in from the workers, which
is three-quarters of the problem half the time, if they can see some benefit it certainly
helps you.
So let’s put all this into practice. We’re going to look at an example of unloading a
pallet with the help of Jane. Jane is a safety officer at a supermarket.
Before kicking off the three PErforM steps, Jane firstly pinpointed a problematic task
in her workplace – unloading a pallet. She saw this task as being risky because workers
have experienced injuries or pain during or after unloading activities. Jane then followed
the first PErforM step and gathered some background information about the task from the workers
to help her fill out worksheet one. For this example, they received ten pallets a day,
three days a week. It takes two to three hours for six workers to complete the task.
Step two, and Jane’s now onto worksheet two where she needs to identify which parts
of the body are affected and how she’ll group them together. Jane has seen the potential
trouble spots of the lower back, shoulder and the hand and wrist. The hand and wrist
have been grouped together as they have similarities in their movements, position and effort. The
next thing she does is rate each risk factor for each body part. Exertion has been rated
as a four for the shoulder, as there is a substantial amount of effort needed to move
the boxes and the movements are fairly quick. Awkward posture has also been rated as a four,
as the worker is reaching to one side of the body when picking up the boxes. There’s
no vibration involved in this task so we can rate this risk factor as a one for all body
parts. The task takes two to three hours to complete, which fits in the highest category
for duration because it’s greater than two hours. This rating is the same for all the
body parts. The cycle time, which is the time it takes to pick up a box, put it on the trolley
and go back to get another one is five to six seconds. So this would fit in the five
category for repetition because it’s less than ten seconds. The workers and Jane have
completed the ratings for each of the other body parts.
Now that she’s finished assessing the risk factors, she determines where the highest
risks are. From the form, we can see that exertion and awkward posture for the shoulder
and lower back and duration and repetition for all body parts rated in the four or five
categories and need to be controlled very soon.
Her final step is to work out what she can do to reduce these risks. The first priority
should always be to eliminate the risk altogether. But in this case it isn’t an option. The
next best plan is to come up with a design control. By raising the height of the trolley
the risk to the back and shoulder can be reduced. Repetition and duration also rated highly,
so the time that any one worker does the task needs to be reduced. Now that the controls
have been determined, Jane will have to make sure that all the workers know how to do the
job the right way. This doesn’t mean giving them lifting technique training, such as teaching
them to bend their knees and keep their back straight, because this type of training alone
doesn’t work in reducing the risk of injury. Training needs to be specific to this task.
Workers need to know how to use the new trolley. For example, how to adjust it, where it’s
stored and what maintenance is needed to keep it working the way it’s supposed to.
And that’s the PErforM process.
As we’ve seen in this film identifying risks and putting in control measures for manual
tasks doesn’t have to be difficult or costly. In most cases simple, inexpensive measures
can result in huge improvements to safety in your workplace. Safety is not only good
practice, it’s good business.
I think using PErforM has made productivity a whole lot better.
The financial performance of the organisation has increased five hundred percent since we’ve
implemented these programs.
There was a set-up cost, you know, different jigs and all the rest of it and retraining
workers, but it is going to pay off.
Our employees also know that we value them. If we want our employees to show the same
level of commitment to the product that we send out, then we have to show that same level
of commitment to them.
All I can say to anybody else faced with, you know, the circumstances I had if there’s
a better way to do it, do it. Don’t put yourself in a situation where you’re going
to suffer the recurring pain that I’ve got.
Work safe. Home safe.
For more info or copies of the PErforM handbook and worksheets
please visit www.worksafe,qld.gov.au
or call the Workplace Health and Safety infoline on 1300 369 915.