Back Wellness Program

What does your service do for a back wellness program? Do you look at a candidates ability to lift at hire? What tools and procedures do you use to evaluate them? What about after someone has been injured and is about to return to full duty? Are they evaluated then as well? Do you offer yearly education on proper mechanics of lifting and moving patients? And finally for services with these program in place do you receive discounts from your insurance or workmanship comp carrier?

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Permalink Reply by Sean Kukauskas on February 1, 2012 at 7:01am

That was supposed to say workmans comp carrier but autocorrect got in the way. Sorry.

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Permalink Reply by Greg Werner on February 7, 2012 at 4:41pm

A number of Australian ambulance services have "no lift" policies & the NSW Ambulance Service recently won a number of awards for the Bariatric Unit going 10 years WITHOUT a day lost through injury. This record has been achieved via a mix of protocols, education, and equipment with ability to lift NOT being one of the criteria for hiring. It can be done, the young lady on the left of the photo is a working member of this team and proof positive the systems work.

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Permalink Reply by Skip Kirkwood on February 8, 2012 at 5:40am

Greg - what does "no lift" mean?

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Permalink Reply by dr-exmedic on February 9, 2012 at 12:04am

I've worked for a large corporation which included a lifting test as part of the hiring process, a small service which didn't need anything beyond a copy of your cert and driver's license, and another small service which began requiring a lifting test on hire about 1 year after I started there (they went back and tested all the existing employees, and employees are re-tested if they're off work for an injury, but volunteers are never tested--perhaps because the volunteers end up on the township's comp rather than the services).

Perversely, it's only the 3rd of those services that annually has a chiropractor come in and talk about back health. I always go to that con-ed, and I swear to you it's merely a matter of schedule luck and nothing to do with the chiropractor being rather good-looking.

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Permalink Reply by Sean Kukauskas on February 9, 2012 at 6:27am

Thanks for the feedback. We are a rehabilitation hospital based service with 13 trucks both ALS and BLS and I want to institute some sort of back program. Being part of a rehab hospital we have the benefit of easy access to a very aggressive OT/PT program. So I have been trying to do some research to see what testing procedures are being used at other services. It would be nice to have the resources to outfit my service with something similar to the Australian program but that's not to realistic right now. Do you know how effective the lectures from the Chiropractor were in reducing injuries?

dr-exmedic said:

I've worked for a large corporation which included a lifting test as part of the hiring process, a small service which didn't need anything beyond a copy of your cert and driver's license, and another small service which began requiring a lifting test on hire about 1 year after I started there (they went back and tested all the existing employees, and employees are re-tested if they're off work for an injury, but volunteers are never tested--perhaps because the volunteers end up on the township's comp rather than the services).

Perversely, it's only the 3rd of those services that annually has a chiropractor come in and talk about back health. I always go to that con-ed, and I swear to you it's merely a matter of schedule luck and nothing to do with the chiropractor being rather good-looking.

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Permalink Reply by Earl Culvey on February 9, 2012 at 4:08pm

I once worked for a hospital-based service that actually had a fairly thorough lifting test as part of the hiring process. They coordinated through the PT Dept to conduct the testing. It envolved lifting several bags of various weights off of shelves of different heights(roughly equivalent to cardiac monitor, primary bags at same level as trucks) and then carry them down the hall and up and down several flights of stairs. The also did some "dead lift" tests to simulate lifting a stretcher. They also used a meter to test push/pull strength. When I initially was hired there they used a heart rate meter and you had to maintain a "safe" level. They have since abolished that part.

I had the pleasure of assisting the PT Dept with reevaluating the testing after having several back injuries. You had to retake the testing after OJT injuries and I thought parts were not quite up to date. I went into the center with a stretcher and the primary equipment. We also made venture out to an ambulance. Heights, weights and technique were refined to better simulate the updated equipment and vehicles.

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Permalink Reply by dr-exmedic on February 10, 2012 at 6:29pm

Sean Kukauskas said:

Do you know how effective the lectures from the Chiropractor were in reducing injuries?

I don't, and I doubt very much that the boss could prove anything either way either. It was such a small service--15 FT employees when I started, I think they're at 12 FTE now--that the statistics would suffer from a small sample size, so telling the before/after difference might take years, and might not even be comparable without complications of adjusting for inflation, etc.

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Permalink Reply by Greg Werner on February 12, 2012 at 5:10pm

Hi Skip,

sorry for the lateness of the reply was away from the office for 2 days. "No Lift" means just that. Service protocols advise that EMTs are not to lift a patient or stretcher & as such have invested heavily in ways and means of making this happen, both in terms of gear & operational processes. All of this is driven by the need to reduce insurance premiums for back injury claims. Admittedly our services are much larger than those in the states but the concerns are just the same, just on a larger scale. I will get you a contact at the most proactive of our services.