Occupational Medicine
Injury Prevention
You can prevent injuries before they happen by developing an effective injury prevention strategy, assessing the workplace and ensuring staff have the knowledge they need to be successful. Injury prevention is provided for all industries, including the office setting, construction site, heavy manufacturing, light manufacturing, meatpacking, warehousing, agribusiness, food services and health care settings.
Our team in Owatonna has industrial consultants with over 50 years of clinical experience. We have an industrial/ergonomics specialist who is a board-certified ergonomist by the Board of Certification in Professional Ergonomic. We also have an ergonomics analyst who manages all ergonomics needs in the Southeast Minnesota Region.
Injury prevention strategy
Planning ahead can reduce your incident rates, keep your employees safe and help them work to their full potential.
Referral for injury prevention can come from both physicians and employers:
- Physician referrals
Our team assists the employee with medical management strategies and provides them with injury prevention techniques. - Employer referrals
Our team assists employees with eliminating ergonomic design mismatches and technique mismatches. We collaborate with managers and supervisors to help them understand how best to provide rapport, effective training and sustainable coaching methods.
Ergonomic assessments
An industry consultant will assess your workplace ergonomics and provide recommendations to create a zero-injury workplace, decrease loss ratios, decrease modification ratings, and lower workers' comp costs.
Assessments can be provided individually for an employee or injured worker, or they can be provided for an entire department or company as part of a comprehensive ergonomics control program.
Ergonomics consultants will collaborate with your leaders to ensure a safe workplace. Consultants arrive at your facility and provide an assessment that will outline ergonomic risk and recommendations for improvement based on ergonomic design and build guidelines to eliminate ergonomic design mismatches and employee technique mismatches.
Consultants will:
- Complete brief employee interviews to become familiar with your organization and to understand concerns from an employee perspective.
Identify ergonomic risks that include, but are not limited to, awkward postures, forceful exertions, repetitive or prolonged activities, environmental exposures, and poor work process. - Provide recommendations to address ergonomic design and technique mismatches.
- These recommendations are usually low-cost/high-impact solutions. Our consultants also will collaborate with your engineering/tooling/maintenance teams to modify tools/workstations to maximize the success of your employees by eliminating ergonomic risk factors.
Education and training
Our Occupational Health team provides a wide variety of educational opportunities for leadership teams, managers, supervisors and employees to improve workplace safety. Workplace safety training ensures your employees have the skills they need to maintain a safe working environment. Educational offerings include CPR/AED training, OSHA classes, personal protective equipment training and reasonable suspicion training.
A variety of opportunities are available, including:
- Comprehensive ergonomics control program/processes
- Office ergonomics
- Industrial ergonomics
- 24-hour injury prevention training
- Back injury prevention training
- Upper extremity cumulative trauma prevention training
- Safe patient handling initiatives for health care settings
- Pre-work stretching training
- Three-day leadership training, which highlights injury prevention strategies, ergonomic design and build guidelines, medical management, early return to work and “energy strategies” that keep every program alive and sustainable