Preventing Repetitive Stress Injuries
Preventing Repetitive Stress Injuries
One of the most common employee-related injuries within a law firm is a repetitive stress injury.
Repetitive Stress Injuries are common for anyone that does any of the following:
- Sit at a desk in front of a computer all day?
- Drive a bus or operate heavy equipment?
- Stretch your arms or twist your back to reach your work
- Lift or carry materials?
- Spend most of the day on your feet?
- Use hand tools?
- Repeat the same motions over and over?
Education support professionals can suffer from hand and wrist disorders, back and neck injuries, and muscle strains due to repetitive motions or awkward work positions. Poor designed equipment, improper lifting, and forceful exertions increase the chances of injury to wrists, arms, back, or shoulders.
Specific work activities that you do every day can cause tiny injuries to your shoulders, elbows, wrists, hands, fingers, knees, or back. Each trauma alone is so minor that you don’t know it is happening . . . until all the little injuries add up and you’re in pain.
The good news is that most of these disorders are preventable. For ample, just as you would adjust a vehicle’s seat if you sat in it for the first time, your workstation needs the same type of adjustments. If y work in a seated position, you may need to raise or lower your chair. Compu er operators usually can adjust the height of their keyboard and the angles of their monitor and keyboard.
In many cases, the problem isn’t the job you’re doing or the tool you’re using but how you’re doing or using it. Over ad reaches, lots of lifting and bending, wrist rotations — the things you usually do without thinking can create a problem. The motion itself may be harmless, but when you do it many times a day, you can hurt yourself.
Poorly designed or maintained work environments and a poorly designed job or workstation can increase the likelihood of repetitive stress injuries or other adverse health effects. Environmental factors such as heat or cold, lack of ventilation, noise, vibration, and too much or too little light can worsen ergonomic problems.
For every law firm, we recommend taking some time to ensure your employees’ workstations are correctly adjusted and will help your support staff avoid potential injuries.