Last month’s European Health and Safety Week saw renewed promotion of a technique for flagging workers’ health problems, especially musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs), which unions have used successfully since the mid-1990s. 1990. It’s a simple, usually pictorial approach that can work particularly well with people whose first language is not English, and has the rare distinction of giving employees some entertainment in a health and safety exercise.
The technique is ‘body mapping’, a technique developed in the 1970s at the University of Nottingham and promoted by unions in Spain, the United States and Mexico to encourage workers to report symptoms of ill health. By 1996, body mapping was at the top of the Canadian labor movement’s safety agenda and five years later Canadian unions were actively promoting it.
The technique involves workers creating a “body map” of health problems by sticking flags on a schematic diagram of the human body to indicate areas where they experience pain or discomfort. Employers can then use this information to identify trends, analyze work processes, and implement measures to reduce risks before workers’ health is harmed.
Oh! decals
The effects of the work environment on the health of workers are difficult to establish: workers often dismiss minor health problems as insignificant or unrelated to their jobs, so it can take some time to establish a link between the symptom and the problem. Workplace. Other workers may be reluctant to self-report for fear of losing their jobs (see Please speak up).
The thinking behind body mapping is that if workers doing a job gather information about whatever health problems they are experiencing, regardless of whether they believe it is caused by their work, patterns can emerge that might otherwise go undetected.
There are several different approaches to body mapping. The simplest model might use two large outlines of the human body – front and back views – on which workers mark (using stickers or a pen) any areas where they feel discomfort or pain that can be attributed to the job. Color coding can be used to indicate pain levels or different types of symptoms, for example, physical discomfort, stress/anxiety, and ongoing problems, such as reproductive problems. In some exercises, workers may be asked to add notes to the diagrams that explain why they have marked an area.
There are numerous variations on the technique. A task-based approach helps to closely link body mapping to the job: one worker imitates a particular operation and the others apply stickers (“ouch stickers”) to their colleague’s body to identify problem areas and symptoms .
Whatever the details of the exercise, a common requirement is that workers in a body mapping session must perform the same or very similar jobs, otherwise the results will not be meaningful.
“The best body mapping sessions are the ones where you get a group of workers, who do a similar type of work, together for an hour and a half, or even two hours, and ask them to talk together about the exercise,” he says. Doug. Russell, a health and safety officer with the United Retail, Distribution and Allied Workers Union (Usdaw). ‘Because it’s by talking to each other that ideas come out.’
Different jobs will generate different ‘maps’. A body map of a group of drivers can be expected to show clusters of flags around the lower back area (as a result of prolonged periods of sitting or poor driving position or posture), legs and wrist (for pedal use and gear changes) and stomach (as a result of digestive problems caused by inappropriate or irregular meal breaks). A body map for a group of office workers may show clusters around the wrists, shoulders, and neck (resulting from DSE use or stress) or around the eyes (indicating eyestrain from prolonged screen work). ).
Armed with this simple graphical information, the employer or safety manager can take action, whether it be training, changes in work patterns or processes, or a review of equipment in use.
keeping it simple
Workers generally know their jobs and the associated risks better than anyone, but they may lack the opportunity or inclination to discuss their concerns with each other or with their managers. For the embattled safety manager trying to encourage workers to care about and take responsibility for their own safety and health and that of their colleagues, body mapping can be a useful tool. You can promote awareness of health and safety hazards and get workers thinking about ways they can help control hazards and prevent injuries.
‘The whole point of the exercise is to take advantage of people’s experience and do it collectively,’ explains Russell. ‘It helps people identify aches and pains that could very well be work related because more than one person is concerned. People often tend to think that they are just getting old or a little out of shape. But when you really get them all together and they all say that working on that particular machine or working on that particular box is causing their shoulder aches and pains, you can see that there’s something there and start trying to figure out what it is. is.
“Workers can not only identify the problems, but they can often identify practical solutions as well.”
A key attraction of the method is its simplicity. “It’s a relatively easy way to collect information about aches and pains, cuts, bumps, bruises, headaches, eyestrain – a whole range of potential occupational health problems,” confirms Phil Madelin, national health and safety officer for Public and Commercial Services. Union (PCS). ‘One way it works really well is if you combine it with a mindfulness exercise. I very often recommend it to people as part of a range of workplace inspection techniques.’
workers’ recreation
Another characteristic of the technique is that it can be fun. If health and safety is an image issue, then an interactive group session with a handful of marker pens and life-size human silhouettes can surprisingly help change worker perceptions. Madelin suggests that one way to conduct a body mapping exercise would be during the tea break of a safety meeting, so that workers can participate informally.
As a primarily visual exercise, body mapping has the advantage of overcoming literacy issues and language barriers. Concerns about protecting the well-being of migrant workers generally focus on communicating safety information to protect them from dangerous situations. Longer-term health problems among migrant workers are a more complicated matter. “With body mapping, you don’t really need to be literate to show where you have aches and pains,” says Mike Gray, head of the HSE’s ergonomics team.
skewed image
It is important to understand the limitations of the technique before beginning. Madelin advises that body mapping is a ‘first step’ in identifying potential health risks at work, but it is not a panacea.
“It’s not scientific,” he stresses. “Just because there are a lot of people reporting the same symptoms, that doesn’t automatically mean that work must be causing it. It is quite possible that a large number of people report the same type of pain, discomfort or tension for a variety of reasons that are not related to work. So the results should be interpreted with some caution.’
What body mapping does do, Madelin argues, is encourage safety representatives, employers and employees to think beyond physical hazards (dragged wires, worn carpeting, objects stored precariously at height) to less visible health issues and often neglected, such as repetitive strain. injuries caused by excessive hours in front of a PC.
The extent to which the reported information remains private to the individual depends on the approach. A breakout session will require workers to be open about health issues in front of their colleagues, which some employees may find intrusive. An informal exercise that takes place in a meeting can be more anonymous, especially if workers don’t have to put their names next to their answers. For complete anonymity, individual maps can be distributed for workers to complete and responses to be checked.
This survey-like approach removes the opportunity for open discussion, but it does have its advantages. “A set of questions have been developed to accompany the tool,” explains Mike Gray, “to try to standardize the things that people describe.”
These questions are based on the Nordic Musculoskeletal Questionnaire. Some experts believe that they help focus employee responses and provide more useful information by asking respondents to indicate, using checkboxes, when they have recently experienced pain, whether the pain has prevented them from performing normal activities, and whether the pain appears to be unrelated to work, made worse by work, or caused by work.
“I think the way it should be used is to monitor the effectiveness of interventions,” Gray says, follow-up surveys will indicate whether measures introduced to reduce MSD problems, for example, have been successful. However, the important thing, he warns, is that many people complete it. “If it’s just people complaining anyway, you start to get a skewed picture of what’s going on,” he explains.
10 years later
More than a decade after it began to capture the imagination of safety advocates in North America and the UK, body mapping has had some notable successes (see boxes) and Gray says the HSE encourages employers to give it a try. , especially with “problem jobs”.
“The biggest barrier to body mapping is the logistics of getting people to spend time off work to do it,” says Usdaw’s Russell. “But it certainly has worked in sectors where it has been proven.”
When it has been difficult to get workers together for an exercise, Russell has used informal questionnaires and surveys instead. ‘But they don’t work as well,’ he believes, ‘because you don’t get the exchange of information between different people.’
Phil Madelin compares the technique to the HSE Stress Indicators Tool, “consisting of 35 questions that elicit people’s subjective views of a situation, but highlight areas for further investigation.”
“I think employers should be as ready to respond to body mapping indicators as they are to any other indicator of a potential health and safety crisis,” he says. “But what I wouldn’t want is to see security reps walk in, wave a body map and say, ‘You’ve got an RSI problem, you’ve got to fix it.'”
‘What I would expect a safety rep to do is say, ‘We did this exercise,’ he highlighted a number of people who complain about these kinds of potential occupational health issues. Obviously, we are not saying that they are all linked to work, but we think it deserves further investigation. How can we work together?”
As part of the 2007 European Health and Safety Week campaign on MSDs, the TUC and HSE produced a body mapping tool that takes the form of a questionnaire (as described above).