How floor walks can improve your workplace safety
by Matthew Pope and Max Cohrssen
If you have an onsite healthcare provider at your business, you probably want them to be busy in the treatment room, diagnosing and managing the musculoskeletal injuries of your workers.
However, one of the most important activities onsite healthcare providers can do is outside of the treatment room. In order to fully understand your workplace and your workers, they need to observe the actual work. One way to do this is through floor walks.
What is a floor walk?
A floor walk involves an onsite healthcare provider being taken to the factory floor to be shown the different tasks along a department line. Watch the video below to hear one of our onsite health providers talk about the benefits of floor walks.
How are floor walks best completed?
Ideally, your onsite healthcare provider should be guided by a relevant worker who will have knowledge about the task. It could be a room supervisor or plant manager. They should walk the provider through all the tasks and rotations.
It is essential that onsite healthcare providers see the workers performing their jobs in person. No amount of video analysis can do justice to being physically present in the working environment. Â
The sights, the smells, the noise, the proximity to others, seeing people work as they normally do day-to-day are all important and can be difficult to translate when watching a video. Live observations allow your onsite healthcare provider to gain a thorough appreciation of what a worker may be experiencing within the work environment, and further improve their management of current injuries.
Â
How can floor walks benefit the organisation and the workers?
Floor walks can:
- Increase familiarity between onsite healthcare provider and workers
- Enhance worker engagement with workplace health and safety
- Improve treatment and rehabilitation plans
- Increase provider utilisation on site
- Help OHS decision making in the future
Additionally, floor walks can help drive positive change within the workplace with your onsite healthcare provider offering an objective viewpoint.
Case study
A worker at a red meat abattoir had been experiencing ongoing, chronic non-specific lower back pain for several months. It took him three months to report this injury. He was from a non-English speaking background and struggled at times to communicate his pain to his manager. He highly valued his job and did not want to make a fuss.
The worker reported that his back was sore from his job, which involved placing a cut into the side of a carcass. As this workplace had been a client of Work Healthy Australia for some time, we had filmed and performed a task analysis of the job. The video footage did not seem to suggest load being placed onto the lower back of the injured worker. It was suggested that he continue with treatment and do rehabilitation exercises.
After a few visits, with no improvement in the case, we asked the worker to look at the video with us, so that he could show what part of the movement was hurting his back. After viewing the video, he told us the job he was doing was no longer performed in the same way, and that a different method was now used.
Using this information, we sought permission to go on the floor and observe the worker, taking a fresh video of him performing his job. During this floor walk, it was observed that the worker sometimes had to bend and reach up, depending on the size of the carcase being processed. This was likely aggravating his back. This was presented to the Safety Manager, and, in partnership, a solution was engineered so that the worker was able to keep his back in positions closer to neutral without significant bending or reaching, thus resolving his lower back pain.
Want to discuss how floor walks combined with onsite early intervention injury prevention and management can benefit your organisation? Contact us to find out more.