Gain ergonomic tools you can implement and share with your employees immediately.

Oftentimes presentations on ergonomics focus on using formulas to try and identify areas of change to implement in hope of reducing the resulting muscular strains, sprains or more serious spinal issues that bring such pain to our employees and cost to our businesses. Trying to understand these ergonomic tools (RULA, REBA< NIOSH Lifting Equation ...) seems to take an advanced degree. This information will present the topic of ergonomics in an easy to understand manner and equip you with tools that you can implement and share with your employees immediately. Back, neck and spine injuries along with musculoskeletal aches and pains can nickel and dime your health department even when they are not so severe that they result in surgical interventions. As management personnel responsible for the health and welfare of our workforce, we often struggle to find ways to effectively result in changes in behaviors for our employees when it comes to safety issues. It is easy to ensure they wear safety glasses, hearing protection, hard hats and steel toed boots. But how do you effectively change their behavior when it comes to issues that can have devastating impact on their health/function, not to mention your bottom line. To effectively affect a change in behavior requires the employee(s) to know the why; why they are being asked to do something different or what’s in it for them. Without this knowledge, behavior change will not come or it will not last.

This information, presented by an occupational therapist who is actively working with injured workers every day, will provide you with a teaching format that you can adapted and present to your employees.

Learning Objectives

• You will be able to describe the steps necessary to ensure safe material handling/lifting and how to teach these to others whether they be family members or employees.
• You will be able to recognize anatomy and physiology of the spine, intervertebral disc, spinal and peripheral nerves and their relationship to posture and movement.
• You will be able to discuss how compressive forces that affect the intervertebral disc play a critical part in degenerative issues and how to implement biomechanical ergonomic solutions.
• You will be able to explain how to effectively analyze your safety audits, looking at them with new eyes, identifying the true job(s) and ways to eliminate those activities that have nothing to do with the job but rather how.