Exercise tapped to avoid reportable injuries, keep employees fit for work

One plus to the sports medicine model is that the service is often classified as first aid and is not a reportable event under the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s rules on tracking injuries, said Tony Kaczkowski, Milwaukee-based chief strategy officer for national industrial sports medicine provider Briotix Health Ltd.

Mr. Kaczkowski, whose background includes working with college football teams and Olympic speed skaters, demonstrated stretching techniques for common industrial pain — neck, shoulder, and back, for example — to safety professionals attending the Volunteer Protection Program Participants Association’s Safety + Integrated Safety & Health Management Systems Symposium in New Orleans in August.

He went through stretches that workers can do to manage “discomfort,” the predecessor to pain and later on, an injury and an OSHA-reportable event.

Dr. Tommy Hysler, Houston-based chief medical officer for the Houston Area Safety Council, said employers thinking of the sports medicine prevention approach — which he said can also fall under the category of “work hardening,” or a process that provides body conditioning for work among other tasks — should be sure not to cross the “thin line” between the prevention techniques and a comp injury.

“As soon as somebody says ‘I am injured, I am in pain, I have a problem,’ that automatically kicks into physical therapy,” which becomes a comp claim, he said. “There’s a very fine line between physical therapy and a work conditioning program. Formal physical therapy is a ding on their record per OSHA. Work hardening is not.”

Dwight Gaal, Detroit-based chief executive officer for The Industrial Athlete Inc., said one approach to avoid an OSHA report is to speak with a supervisor to find a way to keep a worker in the job but eliminate the task that is aggravating pain.

“Following OSHA’s definition of first aid, we can provide heat, cold, over-the-counter anti-inflammatories in nonprescription doses, we can do manual exercises, we can temporarily modify the job without it being considered restrictive duty,” he said. “We can continue to treat for two weeks to see if the issue resolves. It usually doesn’t take us two weeks; it’s a matter of days.”