Our national back injury disgrace

Today, the statistics tell us that about 200 workers, in Australia, will experience a manual handling type injury bad enough for them to take at least seven days off work and to seek a compensation payment from their employer. This will also happen tomorrow and the next and the next. Lifting, carrying and bending injuries are the most common type of injury in the workplace. In the worst instance sufferers spend significant time off work, endure constant discomfort and have inordinate stress placed on their life. Statistics tell us that those injured workers will have eight times greater chance of marriage breakdown and fourteen times greater chance of suicide, drug dependency,gambling addiction an so on.

I was involved in a Workcover NSW symposium in 2005 that was looking at OHS trends. Of 12 industry groups represented all determined that manual handling injury was their worst area of performance. SInce then money has been thrown at manual handling training, manual handling programs, manual handling equipment but the figures are still incredibly high. Why is this so?

My experience is that people move automatically in life. We don't stop to think about how we move-we just move. It is an unconscious and usually an unreasoned response to a stimulus. That's perfectly natural. Why should we be conscious of the way we move?

The answer is we should be conscious of the way we move because:-

1. We have an incredibly high injury rate amongst people who lift, carry and bend.
2. Occupational movement has to be different in character to ordinary movement.
3. The stats tend to indicate that there is an endemic problem with how people are moving unconsciously. (1 in 4 Australians will suffer a back injury in their life!) 

Most people I come across believe that movement either in life or in the workplace is just common sense. They say all you have to do is bend at your knees and keep your back straight and this will prevent injury. Yet, when you speak to people who have injured their back, neck, or knees they will rarely say that they failed the common sense test. They will quite often report that they are completely mystified as to what it was that caused their injury, or they will blame an inanimate object, "the chair hurt my back"; "it was my boss', I picked up a piece of paper" and so on. 

Over one hundred years ago, FM Alexander said that it was very important for people to begin to open their awareness to their movement. He claimed that on inspection the movement that people assumed they were doing often did not match up with the movement that actually occurred. Alexander observed patterns of pressure, dis-coordination and inaccuracy that he called mis-use. Mis-use not only affects the quality of your movement, it also affects your ability to accurately discern your movement. SO many people think that they are doing one thing when in fact they are doing something else entirely. 

We may give an employee a direction to bend their knees and keep their back straight but if Alexander is right we cannot guarantee that the instruction has been understood nor accurately translated into movement by that worker. This is a formula for continuing high incidence of injury and cost to our society.

Industry and society can no longer afford to ignore the discoveries of FM Alexander. Rather, it's time that those discoveries were evaluated, assessed and implemented to minimise the risk of manual handling injury in the workplace and to allow for the accurate rehabilitation of those people who have sustained injury and require a return to work.
Go to my website at http://www.backrescue.com.au