Assessing the risk of injury to your workers
The key to providing a safe working environment for your team lies in the maintenance and future development of safe workplace practices.
With a Musculoskeletal Risk Assessment, consideration will be given to factors such as manual handling, posture and environment, resulting in a better ergonomic practice and all-round safer workplace environment.
What’s involved in a musculoskeletal workplace risk assessment?
Observation
When a risk assessor from Active Intervention Management Ltd initiates a workplace risk assessment, one of the first steps is to actively observe the workers as they complete normal tasks. We will observe, question and take notes, photographs and videos for later analysis.
Assessment and determination
We then use the information we gather during our observation in conjunction with our risk assessment tools, to determine the biomechanical/physical requirements of each assessed task.
Musculoskeletal workplace reports
Once the biomechanical/physical determination has been made, we provide our clients with a detailed injury management resource relating to each task observed. This report will contain each task and the related physical demands and will offer a detailed breakdown of the physical demands of the job. This can be used within the workplace and for assessment by other health professionals. These reports are particularly useful for returning a team member to work post-injury or illness, where tasks have been pre-assessed as sedentary, light, medium, heavy, or very heavy. Based on these assessments, employees are able to return to a role where their safety is assured.
Assessment Tools: How do we estimate risk?
We use three main musculoskeletal assessment tools when estimating risk within the workplace. These tools allow us to accurately determine the physicality required to complete a task, while also assessing the viability of the current working environment.
Task Analysis Tool
AIM’s health professionals use a detailed Task Analysis Tool to evaluate the actions required for any particular task, from a musculoskeletal/physical standpoint, and an environmental awareness standpoint.
The Rapid Entire Body Assessment (REBA)
We also use the Rapid Entire Body Assessment (REBA) method, developed by leading ergonomists as a postural targeting method for estimating the risks of work-related entire body disorders. This assessment gives a quick and systematic assessment of complete body postural risks to an operator. REBA analyses the risk related to each task, giving a score relating to both risk level and urgency of investigation.
The DPI Risk Reckoner Tool
The DPI (Discomfort, Pain and Injury) Risk Reckoner Tool is also used to identify risk. Developed by ACC here in New Zealand, this tool enables identification of possible risk of discomfort, pain and injury while at work.
Outcomes and Benefits
We collate all assessed data to provide a comprehensive overview of risks within your workplace. This is then referenced against control options, which are broken into solutions to eliminate, isolate or minimise the risk factors to the operators.
Active Intervention Management offer a comprehensive musculoskeletal/physical analysis, assessment, control and report solution for all workplace environments.
Protect your workforce with targeted solutions that work!
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