Tomorrow (29th Feb) is International RSI Awareness Day.

Repetitive strain injuries are on the increase, and the Chartered Society of Physiotherapists (amongst other organisations) are busy in the media highlighting this increase and the costs to business of absences due to RSI.

The advice the CSP give for avoiding developing RSI and other musculoskeletal health problems is pretty straightforward – make sure you don’t over-stretch your body while you’re doing your repetitive tasks, and make sure you take regular short breaks. Isn’t it weird how few of us (myself definitely included) find it so hard to do these simple things?

The limitation of single-day campaigns like this is precisely that they are “one-offs”. Once the message has been delivered, that’s it. The same with employers providing DSE training once or twice a year – perfectly sensible messages seem to bounce off the impenetrable shield of our bad habits!

It’s precisely this problem that PostureMinder was conceived to overcome. Instead of just telling you once about how you should be sitting, it proactively helps you to sit like that. When you go back to your bad habits, you get a friendly reminder – nothing severe (some employers have asked for an electric shock, but we’re saving that for version 2.0!), just a gentle message to help you change how you’re sitting.

There’s no point trying to force the issue, people have to go at their own speed and assign their own priority to the issue, so we provide plenty of settings for people to adapt it to suit them.

Now PostureMinder doesn’t directly look at anything to do with RSI. But by encouraging you to take regular breaks, and not to sit in bad postures that are likely to have a knock-on effect on how you type, mouse, and hold your shoulders while using the computer, it’s bound to have a significant knock-on effect on your risk of RSI as well as back, neck and shoulder pain, headaches and eye fatigue. And it’s an effect that won’t be here today, gone tomorrow – unlike RSI awareness day!

Compensation Culture?

A lot of people who see our awarding-winning software take to it from the point of view of reducing the costs of absences and underperformance due to ill-health. Others see it as a cost-effective way to show their concern for the health and well-being of individuals.

There is, of course, another side to all this – the dreaded and much talked about compensation culture!

At the moment, computer-related musculoskeletal disorders such as back, neck and shoulder pain, aren’t really on most companies’ radar from a compensation point of view, or even in terms of general costs. Sure, the odd person will go off sick and need rehabilitation back into work, but in the UK at least most companies are partially insulated from the costs of this through our NHS.

Obviously some costs are incurred through providing private medical treatment, and through covering for absences, but the vast majority of the costs of these conditions are hidden – poor performance, making more mistakes, low morale, staff turnover etc.

In terms of the compensation culture, only RSI-related claims seem to have been brought to-date, and even then only in small numbers. There have been a few prominent cases, such as the bank worker who was awarded £250,000 compensation for developing RSI after not being trained properly.

However, widespread computer use at work or home has only really been with us since the early 90s. As other posts I’ve put up mention, there’s evidence that computer-related musculoskeletal disorders are a widespread and growing problem, especially amongst young people.

The no-win, no-fee lawyers have been very successful with a series of health problems, such as mining illnesses, asbestosis, vibration and hearing injuries. As the number of people employed in manual work continues to reduce, these are likely to dry up as sources of income.

Either the lawyers will need to find new health conditions to focus upon, or the number of lawyers will need to reduce as work dries up. In the history of civilisation, I’m not convinced the number of lawyers had ever decreased at any point!

With getting on for half the workforce using computers on a day to day basis, if I was an injury lawyer I know where I’d be looking. Employers with an eye on the longview shouldn’t just be thinking in terms of meeting their legal obligations – they should be looking to demonstrate that they have gone beyond the bare minimum and taken every reasonable step to look after their staff.

Training and good quality ergonomic furniture are obviously key to that. I believe PostureMinder is a cost-effective addition to this equation – it’s about giving your employees the tools to help themselves. By providing it to employees you’re making a statement that you care.

No-one knows what the future will bring, but it’s always worth taking out a little insurance.