Webinar series
Emergency service responders and healthcare workers are often faced with physically demanding tasks that include lifting and moving people and/or objects in unpredictable, unmodifiable settings; this makes training a critical component of a comprehensive injury prevention strategy. The excessive physical effort, repetitive movements, and awkward postures these workers encounter daily are a likely cause of the majority of their injuries.
This free webinar series will begin with a webinar summarizing our current understanding of the effectiveness of manual handling training for injury prevention and management; the best available research will also be used to make general recommendations for training program development, implementation and evaluation. This introductory webinar will be followed by webinars that offer more specific summaries and recommendations for three different sectors: Firefighters, Paramedics, and Healthcare workers.
In this webinar
For paramedics to be physically ready for duty they must have the requisite physical capacity and be able to leverage movement competency to complete the demands of work. In this webinar, we present freely available training tools that provide information to paramedics to both increase movement capacity and competency. We also provide background research that was used to support the development of the available tools and demonstrates the importance of both capacity and competency to paramedic workability.
About the presenters
Daniel Armstrong is a PhD student in the Occupational Biomechanics and Ergonomics lab at the University of Waterloo. His research interests include understanding how interacting personal, task and environment factors influence the range of movement strategies an individual uses in the workplace, as well as quantifying the loading implications associated with movement to infer injury risk. Daniel received both his BSc (2016) and MSc (2019) in Kinesiology from the University of Waterloo.
Dr. Steven Fischer is a leading ergonomics and workplace injury prevention researcher. As Director of the Occupational Biomechanics and Ergonomics Laboratory at the University of Waterloo, Steven and his team study determinants of movement behavior in the workplace, applying this knowledge to improve: work-related functional capacity evaluation; work simulation using digital human modeling; and proactive injury prevention through the design of better, safer products.
Webinar resources
Webinar
recording
(Webex)
Password:
Training2020
Webinar slide presentation (PDF)
Other resources
To complement this webinar series, CRE-MSD has developed three infographic/poster resources on body positioning for the knee, low back, and shoulder for reducing MSD injury risk when performing non-modifiable tasks. These resources are now available as part of the Ontario MSD Prevention Guideline and can be found in the Resource Library, under the Hazard Control category.
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Positioning the Body to Reduce MSD Injury Risk: Focus on the Knee
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Positioning the Body to Reduce MSD Injury Risk: Focus on the Low Back
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Positioning the Body to Reduce MSD Injury Risk: Focus on the Shoulder
CRE-MSD researchers have also developed a position paper sumarizing current best evidence on this topic: Improving Workplace Manual Handling Training Programs.
For assistance, please contact Betina Butler at bbutler@uwaterloo.ca.
Disclaimer: CRE-MSD receives
funding
through
a
grant
provided
by
the
Ontario
Ministry
of
Labour,
Training
and
Skills
Development.
The
views
expressed
are
those
of
the
presenters and
do
not
necessarily
reflect those
of
the
Centre
nor
of
the
Province
of
Ontario.