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Addressing injuries is crucial in any workplace — but what if you could prevent them in the first place? No matter what industry or size of your workforce, every workplace should have clearly articulated protocols when it comes to handling injuries — whether those are in the form of sudden accidents or develop over time due to repetitive motion. But what some workplaces are missing is a plan for preventing those injuries from the start.

As the old saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and in this case, a comprehensive plan that’s tailored to individual employees is far better than costs related to reduced productivity, health care expenses and employee dissatisfaction.

That’s why HealthFitness developed injury prevention and treatment (IPT) programming over 30 years ago, in response to our clients asking about safety initiatives. The request made sense since we are experts at movement and fitness management.

At HealthFitness, our goal is to prevent musculoskeletal (MSK) issues and help employees move without pain or tension, which means helping employees work in safer, healthier ways. Even focusing on simple changes can result in drastic improvements when it comes to cutting down on workplace injuries.

3 key elements of an injury prevention plan include:

1. Address specific issues

Although the IPT professionals can assess a workplace in general, clients often turn to HealthFitness when there’s a problem. Most notably, injury rates are ticking upward, or certain job tasks seem to result in more injuries than they did in the past. When this happens, those on the HealthFitness IPT team come in to observe how employees are moving, which always yields insights on what’s happening.

The HealthFitness IPT team looks at which jobs seem to be the highest risk or what part of the company is experiencing the highest injury rate, and from there, the team develops an intervention that will bring meaningful change.

For example, an industrial manufacturer that uses welders may have noticed significant increases in sick days related to overuse injuries. When our IPT team assesses how the welders move, they notice workers are hunched over for hours at a time, or that they need to reach around equipment in a way that increases their risk exposure. By creating a plan that brings together education about body positioning, changes in workstation setup, and frequent movement breaks, our client is likely to see a major drop in injury reports.

Across our IPT program’s book of business, we have a greater than 90% success rate in preventing MSK incidents from becoming OSHA recordable injuries.

2. Create measurable value

Gauging how well prevention works can be tricky. How do you track issues that don’t happen, or overuse injuries that are avoided? It’s particularly challenging because prevention efforts often take time to roll out and shift a workplace toward more efficiency and safety.

That said, there are some metrics that allow the IPT team to help clients connect the dots. The IPT team tracks metrics from engagement to resolution, and we do that by partnering with clients to look at injury reports and figuring out areas where we can make impactful changes.

With one client, for example, a work crew reported over 20 injuries in a year, and our on-site IPT team focused on simple improvements that were easy for employees to implement. Those shifts included better alignment with working postures, reducing repetitive tasks, and implementing micro breaks. The next year, the crew only had two injuries as a result. The IPT team will continue to refine its improvements until that number is at zero.

3. Offer a comprehensive solution

There are other vendors that make injury prevention their sole focus, but HealthFitness is unique since it’s not approaching IPT as a medical issue to be solved — instead, the HealthFitness approach to fitness and lifestyle coaching provides a more comprehensive program.

If there are questions around mental health, weight, flexibility, nutrition, or strength, HealthFitness has the resources to prompt changes in those areas. There are so many factors that go into why people become injured, and those have to be addressed for a prevention plan. At HealthFitness, we help our clients discover what those factors are, and then implement improvements using our deep well of resources that support the whole person.

Connect with us to learn more about our IPT program.