Ask The Back School: Indications of Pain in Ergonomics Assessments
Ask The Back School: Indicating Pain in an Ergonomics Assessments
Ask The Back School is a feature where our instructors answer user submitted questions regarding ergonomics, safety, wellness and everything in between. In this edition we’ve got a student who needs some advice on writing up a final ergonomics assessment report.
In what cases would mention of pain be appropriate to indicate in a final report?
Below you can find Ron’s response:
I typically recommend to not ask them specifically about pain but to rephrase it more along the lines of, “where do you feel fatigue or discomfort.” If your ergonomics assessment is not part of medical management, then it may be better to refer to the individuals complaints as “the client reports discomfort in the back, neck, shoulders, etc.”
This is only recommendation. The primary goal here is not to increase the client’s reported symptoms but to focus more on opportunities for improvement to decrease their symptoms.
Below you can find a handful of our prior Ask The Back School articles.
You can also view a number of incredibly informative 1hr webinars in our Ask the Experts Webinar series HERE.
Do you have any personal experience from performing evaluations yourself? How do you deal with clients who complain of pain during an evaluation? Sound off in the comments below!
