Tag: Safety and Ergonomics

Hospital and Nursing Home Workers Have High Rates of Work-Related Injuries

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has initiated a new program to help people who work as nurses and at residential care facilities. Last year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that nurses and residential care workers had “one of the highest rates of lost workdays due to injuries and illnesses of all major American industries.” So while people in these industries are caring for others, they are not always taking care of themselves.

According to OSHA, “Nursing aides, orderlies, and attendants had the highest rates of musculoskeletal disorders of all occupations in 2010.” OSHA’s National Emphasis Program for Nursing and Residential Care Facilities was created to help change that. After all, it is difficult to be a caretaker when you are injured. And the high proportion of people in this field who get injured means that their colleagues who aren’t injured have to pick up the slack. This can lower the morale and physical fitness of non-injured employees and increase the chances that they too will get injured.

While some of the illness among those who work in the nursing and caretaking professions can be linked to exposure to hazardous materials and disease, “The data further indicate that an overwhelming proportion of the injuries within this sector were attributed to overexertion as well as to slips, trips and falls.”

Employers can invest in powered movers such as the motorized hospital cart mover from DJ Products to help lessen the risk of employee injury. Motorized carts like these help employees move linen and other goods throughout the hospital and DJ Products offers motorized cart pullers and motorized cart pushers, depending on your need.

Use Our Ergonomic Load Calculator to Improve Workplace Safety

DJ Products offers you material handling solutions that give the opportunity to improve work functions for your employees. And since we know that having employees who are working proficiently and avoiding injury is exactly what you need, we also offer some things to make it easier to complete the work your work as well.

Our Ergonomic Load Calculator is designed to assist the Ergonomist, Safety and Health Specialist, and other professionals interested in improving health and safety practices in their workplace. Perhaps in the past you “guesstimated” what it would take to move certain loads or you relied on previous data. While there is nothing wrong with relying on experience, it also helps to update figures and make certain that you are calculating based on current needs. Conditions may have changed since last you checked or you may have assigned new employees to certain tasks and you need to be certain they will able to complete the work.

The calculator is designed to estimate the amount of horizontal force necessary to move loads (on wheels) using inputs from particular workplace environments. These forces are those required to move loaded carts, castered equipment or machinery on wheels, or product being propelled down an assembly line. The calculator will combine conditions related to the state of the “vehicle health”, floor condition, terrain and footing as well as the weight of the load being moved in estimating these forces.

If you do not have the resources to call in a consultant to help you, you can use a tool like our Ergonomic Load Calculator to make your workplace safer.

Electric Cart Pushers Can Help Hospital Employees Work Efficiently

People who work in a hospital spend a lot of time there but they certainly don’t want to spend a lot of time in the hospital as patients. You can help prevent your employees from experiencing strain and pain as they transport cart through a hospital using an electric cart pusher. You can keep productivity up and avoid having workers on medical leave with the right material handling solutions.

The CartCaddyShorty electric cart pusher is battery powered electric cart pusher designed to have enough power to maneuver a cart through a hospital. It is designed for easy maneuvering and pivoting of your loads. While the CartCaddyShorty electric cart pusher is small, it still has plenty of power to handle most push or pull applications within the hospital industry. This little machine packs a big punch and can usually last for 16 hours or two shifts.

Hospitals are busy environments where efficiency is key. If you work in a hospital, you don’t want to spend time having to make a lot of adjustments to the equipment that has been purchased to make your job easier. The CartCaddyShorty has a spring hitch option and customized attachment—this means that workers will not need to fabricate multiple attachments for the cart or your equipment. Since the CartCaddyShorty’s attachment springs down and upward and attaches firmly to the bottom of the cart, an operator can easily get to work pushing, pulling or maneuvering the cart.

Call us today at 800-686-2651 and talk to a Sales Engineer who’d be happy to give you a recommendation on the material handling solution that will work for your hospital or medical facility.

Power Tuggers Can Prevent Injury and Increase Productivity

If your employees need to transport heavy items over short distances, your workplace could definitely benefit from using industrial tuggers.

According to Safetycommunity.com:

“At a major food processing plant, workers had to manually push heavy meat carts to maneuver them between processing stations. Concerned about injury risk and worker safety, plant executives turned to DJ Products for ergonomic solutions to their material handling problem.”

The experts at DJ Products recommended the CartCaddyShorty power tugger, a motorized cart mover designed to push, pull and maneuver carts that require turning.

Safetycommunity.com highlighted the importance of finding ergonomic solutions when workers need to transport goods. An employer may think that obtaining a regular cart with wheels will solve the issue, but if that cart has not been specifically designed to help a worker maneuver without twisting the body in harmful ways, this could cause even more problems.

In addition to meat, these tuggers can carry a variety of items such as a bin full of washers, a flat bed of steel or a cart full of cookie dough.

The CartCaddy Shorty was engineered so that an employee carrying a heavy load would be able to move, turn, and maneuver it in tight spaces, such as those in a meat processing plant. Not only does this help prevent injuries, it also helps to ensure that the food being processed gets transported between stations without having a cart tip over. This tugger is the smallest, most maneuverable tug available on the market, and still has plenty of power to handle most push or pull applications.

A tugger can also increase overall productivity. A single employee can now negotiate heavy carts, which may have previously required multiple operators to maneuver. As a result, the operators eliminated from these tasks are available to take on other responsibilities.

 

 

Ignoring Ergonomics Can Lead to Injury

We discussed “The Scientific Roots and Business Applications of Ergonomics” to give you some background on this topic and help you to understand why employers need to think of ergonomics as more than a buzzword; it is a useful science that can make your workplace more productive and profitable. DJ Products designs material handling solutions that are not simply designed to get the job done or move objects from one place to another; they are designed to help your employees avoid painful injuries as they do their work.

The injuries that result from ignoring ergonomics are very real. Some can take an employee away from work immediately; others result in wear and tear over time and gradually make it more difficult for employees to complete tasks.

These kinds of injuries are caused not just by repetitive motions but also by forceful motion, which Empowher.com defines as including “actions like lifting things that are too heavy, working on bolts that are rusted on, or a squeezing motion that is too frequent for comfort or too hard for the hand.”

Here are some of the conditions you can help your employees to avoid:

Lumbar (lower back) injuries– “caused by bending, lifting, pulling, pushing and twisting improperly.”

Tennis elbow– the elbow becomes painfully inflamed after the forearm has been repeatedly rotated with too much force or too often

Rotator cuff injury – it becomes painful to move the shoulder and arthritis may result from repeated arm movements, especially repeated use of the arms over the head

Tendinitis– various joints become painfully inflamed because of bad posture and repetitive movements

Hospitals: Help Your Staff Treat Summer Injuries

Summertime and the livin’ is easy…people like to spend time outside, getting into summer sports and being more active. We all hope for the best but we know that an increase in activity increases the chances of injury. For this reason, hospitals need to stay on alert and be ready for patients who arrive and need help after a baseball game, water skiing, a race, or an impromptu tumble down a hill.

During the summer, you need all of your staff ready to work and assist. You will want your employees ready to work and not injured themselves from attempting to hurry while transporting supplies needed for patients that arrive with injuries. DJ Products makes powered carts including a Powered Dirty Linen Cart, Powered Housekeeping Cart and a Motorized Clean Linen Wire Cart that can keep work moving efficiently and allow employees to navigate tight corners safely.

Our products can also reduce the chance that your employees will experience muscle strain or musculoskeletal injuries as they push or pull carts with heavy loads through hospital corridors. All of our products are battery powered “walk-behind units” that allow for better operator control than traditional wheeled carts. Because of this operating flexibility, our electric cart movers can be used in more applications than standard material handling equipment.

Check out our products online and if you have questions, you can call our Sales Engineers at 800-686-2651 and ask for a recommendation on your proper solution. One of our Sales Engineers will be more than happy to explore custom applications where our base products match primary criteria.

Ergonomic Material Handling Equipment Prevents Strain and Injury

When you hear the word “ergonomics,” the first part of the body you think of may be the back, but ergonomically designed equipment helps reduce strain all over the entire body. Overusing certain muscles repeatedly while completing work tasks can lead to pain and injury that affects an employee’s psyche and ability to work.

According to About.com, “Ergonomics derives from two Greek words: ergon, meaning work, and nomoi, meaning natural laws, to create a word that means the science of work and a person’s relationship to that work.”

DJ Products makes Ergonomic Material Handling Equipment that moves naturally with the body and can eliminate the strain of manually pulling heavy product, parts carts, or wheeled equipment. We make “walk-behind” units that allow for better contra by the operator because they work as extensions the body. Rather than attempting to push, pull or otherwise coerce a cumbersome piece of equipment that likely is weighed down with a lot of supplies to move, workers who use DJ Products equipment can guide our products to where they need to be. Because of this operating flexibility, our electric cart movers can be used in more applications than standard material handling equipment and they work better in tight, difficult spaces.

Take some time to peruse the products on our website to find the products that match your specific need. Or if you prefer, you can call one of our Sales Engineers at 800-686-2651 so we can recommend a product that will help decrease the chances that your employees will experience strain or injury as they complete certain tasks.

Invest in Ergonomic Material Handling Solutions

They say you have to spend money to make money but deciding which expenditures are worthwhile is certainly not easy. Business owners have to concern themselves with the bottom line, often cutting costs to make sure that they don’t wind up on the red. But one area where you might want to consider spending more instead of cutting back is material handling solutions. You may think that not investing in things like industrial power movers or motorized carts will save money because you spend less…but what you are not considering is how much inadequate equipment can cost you in the long run.

Your workers have their own budgets and bottom lines to be concerned about and they may remain silent about the pains and strains of manually pulling and pushing heavy carts and other wheeled equipment because they don’t want to ruffle any feathers. Unfortunately, this means that there may suffer micro-tears and muscle strain that over time gets worse until one day there is an injury that warrants medical attention. In some workplaces, the thought of having just one or two key workers out on medical leave is enough to send management into a panic. It is one thing if employees fall ill or get injured away from the job; having employees suffer injuries at work that could have been prevented with the right equipment is another matter entirely.

Our material handling solutions are not one-size-fits-all: DJ Products will work with you to customize our products so they suit the needs of your workers. Call is at 800-686-2651 to speak with a Sales Engineer today.

Avoid Employee Injury with Industrial Tuggers

A number of recent studies show that workers do not stay home if they are sick because they cannot afford to take time off. Even if workers have paid sick days, they are often afraid to use this time because they do not want their companies to question their dedication.

This same phenomenon occurs when workers are injured on the job. Some injuries are serious and reporting them cannot be avoided. However, The Midwest Disability Blog reported on a study of construction workers found that workers are not likely to report on-the-job injuries:

“Despite being eligible to obtain workers’ compensation benefits for a work-related injury, a new study performed by researchers from Duke University Medical Center, the Chicago Regional Council of Carpenters and the Carpenters District Council of Great St. Louis and Vicinity revealed that more than 30 percent of injuries sustained by carpenters are not reported or rarely reported.”

Some workers fear being punished or pressured to not report an injury, and some even fear being fired for alerting management if they sustain an injury at work.

Although the study examined the practices of union carpenters, researchers felt that “the problem most likely included all types of workers and added that “the problem of not reporting injuries is a larger issue than what was revealed in the study.”

Whatever your workplace policy regarding reporting injuries may be, it is best to avoid employee injury altogether. Ergonomic material handling solutions can help your employees avoid injury. We manufacture power movers and industrial tuggers that eliminate the pain and strain of manual pulling heavy carts and wheeled equipment.

Move Waste Out of Sight Safely with a Waste Container Puller

Municipalities across the nation are examining and changing laws with regard to waste containers and recycling. For example, the Daily Iowan recently announced, “the Iowa City City Council will consider an ordinance that would require was containers to be stored out of public view.” We can’t say exactly how that law will affect businesses or apartment buildings if the council does indeed decide to make this a new law but we can imagine that a place that stored waste containers where they can be seen may need to have these containers moved back and forth for collection.

You can get ahead of the curve and anticipate the need to move waste containers more frequently when you get DJ Product’s WasteCaddyLite waste container puller. Even if your area does not require that your move waste containers out of sight, you may want to get a waste container puller because it will lessen that chances that one of your employees will get injured transporting waste from one location to another.

If your employees have been transporting these kinds of containers on their own, you should know that pushing heavy containers greatly increases the risk of employee injury. A DJ Product’s WasteCaddyLite container puller can reduce injuries arising from accidents and from overexertion. It can also make a three or four person job into a one-person job saving labor costs.

And lest you think that getting a WasteCaddyLite means storing something that is as big as an actual waste container, you should know that WasteCaddyLite waste puller has a compact, ergonomic design. Check out this video to see the WasteCaddyLite in action!