By Tim Clark
Injury Prevention Programs have existed for decades. But 4 major gaps exist.
Part 3 of a 4-part series
#3
PRE-INJURY DATA IS OFTEN DELAYED OR UNDER-REPORTED, CREATING BLIND SPOTS FOR SAFETY
When your employees are engaged in physically-demanding work that involves lifting heavy objects, awkward movements, repetitive motion, and standing for long periods you will most certainly be dealing with workplace injuries.
This type of work creates those sprains, strains, aches and pains that can be minor at first but will turn into major injuries, lost work time, and even the loss of workers for a long term or for good.
While it would be great to track departments and individuals who experience the minor pains before they are sent out to a nearby clinic or for a medical consultation with their doctor, there just isn't enough time or resources to accommodate this or even track pre-injuries. It might be possible to notice a trend in a certain department or at a specific location but there is usually no consistency. So, injury tracking is usually delayed or under-reported and managers don't become aware of problem sites or departments until there have been costly claims and excessive lost work days.
Data for Better Decision Making
When you have relevant data at hand, you have value that can speed up processes, avoid errors, detect and mitigate risks before they happen. In other words, you can make better decisions.
Compiling this relevant data is the hard part.
Marketers can deploy analytics technology to see what advertising performs best. Sales can use their systems to see what type leads generate the most revenue. Accounting most certainly uses financial programs to determine what products generate the highest profits. And so on.
But what can safety professionals do to structure, interpret, process and analyze data? And do it more efficiently and effectively?
Get Yourself Some Healthy Intel
Within Virtual Injury Prevention services from Healthy Roster, you gain access to powerful data about the injuries happening to your workers with Healthy Intel.
This feature provides insights that are not possible for most industrial companies today. You are able to see, at a glance, better information to track conditions by site, shift, department, and environment and provide timely reports to leadership.
First, a little about Virtual Injury Prevention for context. We give your employees access to workplace athletic trainers — available 24x7 — to both prevent and triage injuries. These work ATs are experts in the injuries that lead to those aches and pains from over-exertion, lifting objects, standing for long periods, and repetitive motion. Employees report their minor injuries to the ATs via walk-up kiosk, mobile apps, and hotlines that lead to telehealth video conferences. The athletic trainers conduct ergonomic evaluations, provide mobility advice, continue with ongoing wellness checks, and give access to a preventative LMS for further education.
As you can easily see, this gives you and your safety team access to a lot of data! Data you can use to spot trouble areas and mitigate risks before they become a problem! And you'll be provided with data from late shifts as well as remote locations, without having to rely on anecdotal information from those supervisors, instantly with Healthy Intel.
Interested in finding out how you can more implement a Virtual Injury Prevention pilot at your company? Connect with Health Roster now to discover how we help with remote injury prevention, virtual ergonomic evaluations and follow-up, telehealth triage, and data reporting so that you can affordably know what's happening in every facility and on every shift:
Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 4 to learn more about the Top 4 Challenges in Injury Prevention Programs