Searching for a Professional Ergonomist in the East Bay Area?
Contact Ergobility today in Emeryville, CA.
As hard as it is to believe, ergonomics makes life and your job easier while ensuring your workforce is safe. Irrespective of the size of your company or the industry you operate in, applied ergonomics helps you be at peace. It won’t just be your workforce that will be safe from ergonomic risk factors and hazards, but you would be able to keep your profits rather than pay workers’ compensation claims.
Importance of Ergonomics
Both these human factors sciences play an important role in the successful completion of a task or design. When they work together, they improve productivity and safety while reducing the employer’s costs.
Back injuries are one of the most common disabling injuries that occur. According to a report in 2005 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), approximately $86 billion a year is spent by Americans on treating neck and back pain, which is probably more than any other ailment.
At first, back pain is a simple ache, tension, soreness, or tightness. Moderate or overwhelming pain could occur from a spasm. If left untreated or not treated correctly, this could last for months or even years. Musculoskeletal disorders (MSD) are such a major problem that OSHA wants them recorded in a separate column. It affects both the employer and employee. The employer loses business efficiency, and the employee loses on income and is suffering. It also affects the government as social security costs rise.
In work-related illnesses within the US, ergonomic disorders are the most common. Other musculoskeletal disorders that are not unexpected within a workplace are tendonitis, tenosynovitis, carpal tunnel syndrome, and myositis.
Prevention Is Key
Ergonomics and safety risk assessment can be used when identifying workplace hazards and who is most at risk, it can also be used to put sufficient preventive measures in place. Each assessment should be analyzed through a holistic approach and the total load the body can handle should be taken into consideration.
There isn’t a single factor that could be the cause for musculoskeletal disorders. For instance, manual handling isn’t the only probable cause of back pain, other factors might lead to it like, like force, stress, posture, vibration, the temperature within the office. Safety professionals analyze the safety levels at a job, so why not the ergonomics risk factors too?
Assessing all the potential MSD risks and addressing them in detail is very important. When risk assessments are completed, they need to be targeted towards complete elimination if possible or at least reducing the possible risks to the human musculoskeletal system.
There is a wide range of changes that can be considered when working on preventive actions. Determining work tasks is one of the most significant requirements to lower the demands of a job physically; thus, decreasing the levels of repetition, force, awkward postures, and vibration are important.
Searching for Professional Ergonomists in the East Bay Area?
If you also want to make your workplace safer for your employees and simultaneously save costs, contact Ergobility in Emeryville, CA today!
