Musculoskeletal Disorders Case Summary

Summary: Why are musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) so damaging? They don’t claim a life. They aren’t visually noticeable. But they do have a large and lasting effect on the worker involved and everyone around them. The constant pain and loss of motion associated with these kinds of injuries can drastically affect someone’s quality of life, productivity, as well as their ability to return to their original job position. Every MSD negatively impacts the company by forcing them to pay the price of indirect costs, higher insurance premiums and lowered productivity.

Over the years, health and safety professionals have contributed significant time, resources and energy into preventing MSDs. While their efforts have led to a reduction in these …show more content…
In order to measure and calculate the variations and impact of worker fatigue as the day progresses, one needs to observe their movements over an extended period. The reason health and safety professionals are not able to predict a forward trend in these deviations in fatigue is because of the common practice of job rotation. This practice was implemented in order to ensure workers were not conducting the same movement or task for too long. However, this made it difficult to predict varying levels of fatigue throughout a workers day.

The other issue identified with the processes listed was the means of data collection. Health and safety professionals conduct these audits and inspections, using visual analysis and data collection as the sole methods of gathering information. Visual scanning is useful in detecting physical hazards such as fallen or broken pieces of equipment. It is limited however, in providing the quantification of worker movement required for determining biometric adherence, the consistency of observation and reporting between auditors as well as the accuracy of reporting due to the potential bias of the