Transcription:
Workplace Ergonomics for a Healthier Workspace

Melanie Cole: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, workers suffering from ergonomic-related injuries require more time off the job than those with other types of workplace injuries and illnesses. Ergonomic injuries at work are a widespread and costly problem. My guest today is Julie Barker. She's a physical therapist with Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital. Welcome to the show. What is ergonomics?

Julie Barker, PT, CEAS: A lot of people struggle with that word. It’s an odd word, but if we break that word down, ‘ergo’ is from the Greek word ‘ergon,’ meaning ‘work,’ and ‘nomoi’ means ‘natural laws.’ Ergonomics is the process of designing or arranging workplaces so that they fit for people who use them rather than trying to get the worker to adapt to the work. We’re primarily concerned with fitting the user, equipment and their environment. The better the fit, the more productive, healthy and happy the worker is.  
Melanie: How true. What are some of the most common ergonomic injuries that you see? What are people doing out there that you look at and go ‘that’s going to cause you so much pain?’

Julie: I frequently have a habit of critically looking at many people as they're performing their job either sitting at a receptionist desk or out in the environment working, but in 2016, there were approximately three million workplace injuries that occurred at a rate of almost three per 100 full-time equivalent hours. Now, the NIOSH – the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health – reports that 80% of workers will have back pain and 75% of workers will have wrist and hand pain some time in their working life. I would say that's pretty much what I see as well. Back injuries and wrist and hand pain are the most prevalent injuries that I run across out in the ergonomics field.

Melanie: What are some of the risk factors that predispose somebody to wrist and hand or back pain from their workstation?

Julie: There could be many and it really dependents upon what type of workstation you're working in. If you're working in the office environments, one of the biggest things that I find is the chair, that the worker is not seated correctly, they're not positioned well in their chair. When we adjust their chair, we basically fit this person in the chair and then we move the chair up into the workstation and tweak different things there including the mouse, the keyboard, the monitor, so basically make sure that everything is set up to fit that particular individual. You would be surprised how many times I go to do an ergonomic assessment and find out the individual has never adjusted their chair, never played with the bells and whistles, sort of speak. That's mainly what I see with the office place worker.  

In the industry environment, that's a little bit different. There, I tend to see more back injuries where the work environment is not set up correctly; in other words, they're not doing their lifts in their power zone. The power zone is that place right in front of your belly button between your knees and shoulders. When you're doing all of your lifting of your work in that area, you're the least likely to suffer an injury, but if you're working outside of that area, maybe in an awkward posture that you sustained for static periods of time, those are the type of things that are going to increase an injury for you. That's pretty much what I see in the industrial area. The other thing is forces, but often times we'll see knobs or things that don't fit correctly, so workers really trying to force something in with those pressures on the wrist and the hand that can really lead to injury. The other thing is your task. Often times a worker is doing something repetitively over and over again, even though it might not hurt the first two times they do it. When you multiply that little bit of strain for a prolonged period of time may be over an eight or ten hour shift, that really accumulates and can promote that repetitive injury. That's what I usually see.

Melanie: What is a good body position? What do you want people that have to sit behind a computer at a desk? Describe the position in a chair for us with their mouse and where the monitor should be and what you tell people every day.

Julie: I'd be happy to. The biggest thing you can do is really fit yourself correctly into your chair. Some of the things you should look for in a chair is that the seat adjusts up and down. I know that sounds pretty basic, but you'd be surprised how many people I see who are not adjusted correctly. The seat height should be correct. The next thing is the seat depth. You want to make sure that the depth is corrected. You can sit all the way into the back of your chair. If your chair is too short or too long for you, then you're not going to sit correctly. In fact, often times I will see somebody either slumped in their chair on perched on the edge of their chair. If you find that you're doing that, the odds are good that your chair is not adjusted correctly in the seat depth. You need to take a look at that. What we want to see is that there are about three fingers between the back of your leg and the front of the chair. That's a good adjustment for where the seat depth should be.  

The next thing we want to take a look at is where your back support is. You want that little lumbar support to be just below your waistline. Most people think it has to be in the waistline; it’s actually slightly below the waistline. You should be sitting upright, not slumped. When we position you up to your desk, what we want to see is that your elbow has about 90 or slightly greater than 90 degrees of a bend in it. We want your wrists to be straight, we want your keyboard to be as close to the front of your desk as you can get it. Often times, I’ll tell an employee ‘I want you to wear your keyboard like a belt, right in front of you so that you're not reaching forward.’ We want the wrists to be straight; in other words, I don’t want the hand to be cocked up or down. We also don’t want the wrists to be twisted either towards the thumb side or the pinky side. It should be straight. That keyboard should be straight in front of you and then your monitor should be straight in front of the keyboard. If you use a dual monitor, you want to take a look at if you have a primary monitor and you use the secondary monitor and you would want to have the primary monitor pretty much in front of you and the secondary monitor towards your dominant eye. If you use your monitors equally, then you want to be centered in the front of those. As far as your monitor height, I get that question a lot, we want the monitor distance to be about arm’s length away, and I want the top of the monitor to be slightly below your eye level. Speaking of that, this is an important thing. If you wear bifocals, that’s a big no-no ergonomically because you'll tilt your head up to look through the bottom of the bifocal. If you work on a computer a lot, I really recommend that you invest in a good pair of computer single focal length lenses. For an office worker, those are the main highlights as far as positioning yourself.

Melanie: What an amazing description and I know everybody that’s listening to this is going to be doing exactly as you described while you were describing it. That is the beauty of a segment like this. Tell us a little bit about your services at Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital as an ergonomist and how you can assess people’s workstations around the hospital and what you do for them.

Julie: As a hospital, were divided into two areas. We look at office type workstations so that would be from our receptionist that a patient might greet when they first come in, all the way to the back office people who do medical records and data entry and even up into the executive suites. There, we’re really looking at office ergonomics, positioning somebody correctly so that they're comfortable. When they're comfortable, they're going to work better, they’ll be more productive, they're happier employees and all that helps with both worker’s comp cost reduction and retention and making the employee happy. As far as the more industrial components, we are looking at the nursing staff, we’re looking at how they operate individually, both their interaction with the patient – do the beds go up and down high enough, their little mobile workstations, are they're positioned correctly on those, even down to are the wheels performing correctly on those – and we’re looking at the nurse’s stations – the group area that nurses might work in. We’re looking at the task flow – how are the nurses moving through that area, is it efficient, do they have things where they need to have them at the correct height, the amount of things they have to lift, are those correct – looking at all those things. In the industrial sector, we’re also looking at people in warehousing and in our central supply, trying to make those processes more efficient for them so that they're exerting the best amount of energy where they need to.

Melanie: What great information. Wrap it up for us with your best advice for good ergonomics in the workplace, what you tell people every day, what you really want them to know about the importance of having good body posture and positioning to avoid workplace injuries.

Julie: Probably the best advice I can give you is pay attention to the tension. In other words, if you're feeling an ache or a discomfort, pay attention to that. Call ergonomics, notify ergonomics, we'll come out and take a look at it before it becomes an injury. It's important to ask that you're healthy and that you're working right and your conditions are good, so really pay attention to the tension. The next most important thing I can say is to move it. Get up and move. Many times, I'll even intentionally position a printer in a different room so that you get up and move. It's so important that we vary our task. Our muscles need movement. From the little muscles in our eyes to the big muscles in our back, we need to be moving. Vary your task, get up when you can and just keep moving it.  

Melanie: What great information. Thank you so much for being with us today. You're listening to It’s Your Health Radio with Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital. For more information, please visit henrymayo.com. That’s henrymayo.com. This is Melanie Cole. Thanks for tuning in.