Page 60 - Occupational Health & Safety, July/August 2019

HAND PROTECTION
A Frontline AMedical Perspective on Workplace Hand Injuries
BY JENNIFER CHOI
ccording to the CDC, hands and fingers are the most common body parts injured at work, and they represent the most fre- quent reason for non-fatal consultation at
emergency departments (Abdelmoughit, 2017). With direct and indirect costs averaging more than $6,951 per incident, influencing both employer bottom lines and employee lives, safety professionals regularly face the challenge of reducing hand incidents on their sites (Robinson, 2016). In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported finger cuts and lacerations were the third-most-encountered causal diagnosis for time off work, resulting in an average of six lost work days (Kaya, 2011).
No one knows the frontlines of job site hand in- juries like the medical professionals who treat them. Consistently, they patch workers’ hands back to- gether to keep sites running, so their insight on in- jury severity, trends in injury location, and hand in- jury recovery facts are born from real life. We asked several hand surgeons and occupational doctors a handful of industrial hand injury questions to reveal their insight into work-related hand injuries trends, causation, and recovery.
Hands: A Complex Symphony
Hands are a complex symphony of delicate parts that work together. There are 27 bones, 29 joints, and at least 123 named ligaments in the human hand. About one-quarter of all our body’s bones are found in our hands. The palm is uniquely protected by aponeuro- sis, a strong pad of tendons, which enable hands to grip things powerfully. The thumb has special func- tions—opposition, retroposition, palmar abduction, and radial abduction—and accounts for up to 50 per- cent of overall hand use (Gyer, 2018). Fun fact: The right and left hand are controlled by the opposite side of the brain.
Movements of the hand are mostly started by mus- cles in the forearm. There are 17,000 touch receptors and free nerve endings in the palm, sensitive to pres- sure, movement, and vibration.
How Hands Grip
Our hands can grasp and move objects in two dif- ferent ways: with a power grip or precision grip. The object’s size, shape, weight, and ease of handling de- termine which of these two approaches is used. The power grip is better suited for large, heavy objects, and the precision grip is used for small, delicate objects.
Occupational doctors noted repetitive wrist flex- ion, repetitive gripping/grasping, and repetitive use of vibratory tools lead to repetitive strain issues. To re- duce the likelihood of injuries, those in manual han-
dling roles should avoid prolonged constrained pos- tures. Thicker handles to reduce the amount of flexion tension needed to maintain control of a tool, alternat- ing tools and motions, and warm-up or stretching techniques can lower the risk of injury to workers who must perform manual handling tasks.
Who Gets Hand Injuries, and
When Do They Happen?
Regardless whether it occurred at home or at work, almost everyone has had a hand injury at some point in their life. The injuries are a simple outcome of a body part that is both complex, delicate, and always in motion.
A lot of analytical software has been developed to lead organizations to believe that workplace incidents are not only trend based, but predictable. Today’s safe- ty professionals have more data at their fingertips than ever before, but simple hand lacerations continue to plague work sites, creating mountains of paperwork and productivity delays. Some of the more interest- ing insights gleaned from the world of big data upend common preconceived notions that the majority of hand injuries occur at the end of shifts. One study ad- dressed temporal factors, showing a majority of hand
54 Occupational Health & Safety | JULY/AUGUST 2019
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