A retrospective study on the effect of implementing an ergonomics program in an industrial setting

In this retrospective study, the safety record of an industrial equipment manufacturing facility is analyzed between two years (1999 and 2000) to determine the positive effect of an ergonomics program implementation.

Ergonomics-related musculoskeletal disorders are the most prevalent type of illness reported in industry today. In 1998, MSDs affected nearly 1 million employees nationwide and cost an estimated $45-$55 billion per year in workers' compensation. Due to these alarming statistics, many companies are moving toward implementing controls and programs in the workplace to reduce worker exposure to ergonomics hazards. The facility in this study implemented an ergonomics program in January of 2000 and as a result, noticed a significant reduction in ergonomics incidents that year as compared to the previous year.

Using the equations established by OSHA, the incident, frequency, and severity rates are compared from one year (pre- ergonomics program implementation) to the next (post-ergonomics program) in order to determine significant difference between the means utilizing paired comparison statistical t-tests. Also, safety incidents directly attributable to ergonomics hazards and workers' compensation costs are compared between the two years for a significant difference determination. Based on the results of these metrics, the effect of the ergonomics program can be validated.

Statistical t-tests were completed on 13 data sets from each year. Of these, the OSHA incident rate, OSHA ergo-related incident rate, workers' compensation costs, total number of ergo-related incidents, total number of OSHA recordable incidents, and total number of illnesses were considered to have a significant difference between 1999 and 2000 (2000<1999 data). The hours worked and number of employees per month for each year also demonstrated a significant difference (2000>1999). The Wilcoxon Signed- Rank test was also performed on nonparametric data such as total number of strains, sprains, and tendonitis cases per year. From this study however, the only data demonstrating a significant difference between years was the total number of sprain illnesses.

Therefore, using these overall positive results it can be assumed that the ergonomics program did contribute significantly to the reduction of ergonomics and safety related illnesses in the manufacturing facility used in this study.