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The Real Cost of Injury
Injuries on the job are commonplace in every company. Trips, slips, falls, drops, and all other types of accidents can lead to injuries that can have significant implications on your organization’s bottom line. But what if I told you that there was another, slow-developing type of injury that could hinder worker performance and wreak havoc on your company’s profitability? I’m talking about Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSDs), or Repetitive Stress Injuries (RSIs), the boogeyman for office-based employees who work primarily at computers and repeat the same tasks in the same posture day-in and day-out. Although not as sudden as other workplace injuries, MSDs can have a massive toll on your workforce.
Did you know that:
- According to Swedish researchers, up to 50% of workers who frequently use the computer suffer from some RSI symptom.
- About 1.8 million people develop full-blown RSIs at work, and over 600,000 workers require time off to recover per year.
- Employees suffering from occupational RSI’s take an average of 23 days to recover, compared to an average of 9 days for other workplace injuries.
- According to OSHA, MSDs account for more than $20 billion annually in workers’ compensation and up to $100 billion for indirect costs like hiring and training replacement workers.
Now those are some daunting numbers, but they are a little vague. RSIs and MSDs can be anything from knee issues, low-back pain, and upper extremity problems like carpal tunnel syndrome, among others. For the sake of this blog, let us narrow our focus a bit and focus on one of the most prevalent MSDs in the office space, carpal tunnel syndrome. For those that are unfamiliar with carpal tunnel syndrome, it is caused by actions that squeeze or irritate the median nerve (which runs through the forearm and wrist into the hand) in the carpal tunnel space at the bottom of the wrist, along with other factors. Carpal tunnel syndrome can be one of the costliest injuries for a company as it often requires time away from work to recover, surgery, or both.
