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An Animated Focus on Safety

Steve Wilder wears a lanyard around his neck with a "Safe-D Begins With Me" tag -- the D being represented by the Disney logo. It's a visual -- yet lighthearted -- clue to his intense preoccupation with making sure all employees, or as he calls them, "cast members," and patrons of the corporations' theme parks, cruises, stores, sporting events, etc., are safe and sound.

"I like to think that everything I do is kind of focused on that in some way," he said. "I do think a lot of it is working at Disney and the culture here."

He noted that Walt Disney had four pillars: safety, courtesy, efficiency and the show. "I think Disney is a very conducive place to work for people that feel very strongly about being a leader in risk management and being safe ... ."

The surprise safety audits at Disney Stores that were initiated under his leadership are going to be rolled out to other Disney operations, including up to 3,000 sporting events around the world broadcast by its subsidiary ESPN, even though those venues are not directly owned or controlled by Disney.

Wilder was chosen as a Responsibility Leader® because the way he thinks, lives and breathes safety all day long wears off on everyone around him.

--By Anne Freedman

President
Emerge Diagnostics

Changing the Injury Assessment Game

An innovative assessment of soft-tissue damage both before and after an incident is making a big impact on workers' comp costs.


Advocates of Dr. MaryRose Reaston's Electrodiagnostic Functional Assessment test say it has the potential to do nothing less than revolutionize worker's compensation.

"I believe this technology she has created will be a game changer in the work comp industry," said Jerry Suther, workers compensation manager at Heartland Express, a national trucking company based in North Liberty, Iowa. "I think it's that unique and significant."

Added Judi Tipps, workers' compensation manager at Johnsburg, Ill.-based Lankford Construction, a nationwide company: "It's the only soft-tissue test of its kind. It can basically tell you whether a person has a muscular or neurological problem. It can really tell me if it's [a work-related] injury ... . And it's the only test like this that is FDA-approved. One of these days everybody is going to know what this is."

Known by the EFA acronym, the test diagnoses and assesses soft-tissue damage of ligaments, tendons and muscles, commonly referred to as sprains and strains -- ailments that have proven to be very difficult to accurately diagnose and assess and represent the highest incident rate, lost days and medical costs in the workers' compensation system.

Dr. Reaston's quest to develop the EFA began when she was in a car accident and discovered there was no reliable way to test for soft-tissue damage.

"The EFA is a medical test that combines five medically accepted tests," she said. "It makes [the tests] better, it makes them non-invasive and it makes them more reproducible. It looks at muscle activity and basically integrates that with range of motion and function.

"We can look at any muscle in the body doing anything and then we can evaluate the amount of muscle compensation and muscle patterns that look at acute injuries or chronic injuries," she added.

Dr. Reaston also has developed a system of checks and balances for the test so a baseline assessment of individuals can be compared with a functional assessment after an event involving moving, lifting, pulling or pushing, etc.

"It kind of creates a physiological picture of everything the body is doing relative to soft-tissue injuries," she noted.

Both employees and employers benefit from the EFA, she said.

Dr. Reaston said she and her husband, Phil, who serves as chief technology officer at their company, Emerge Diagnostics, developed the EFA so people could get proper care. Later, they developed it to help level the playing field in the worker's compensation field.

"If an employee says he can do the job, we say, 'Absolutely. We can trust you,' " she said, noting that an EFA test is taken, but not read at that time. "But if there is an injury, the test is repeated on a post-op basis and a comparison is made.

"If there's no change, there's no claim," she observed. "That's the advantage to the employer. If there is a change, then the individual gets the right care from Day One. That's the program we started a year ago and we have done more than 2,000 baseline tests in difficult jurisdictions with no post-loss claims."

Dr. Reaston underscored her belief that injuries related to work should definitely be taken care of by the employer. If it's not related to work, however, it should be taken care of by the private health care sector, she noted.

"She has actually reformed our whole workers' comp claims system," said Judi Tipps at Lankford Construction. "We have thoroughly incorporated her technology into our program. If any of our people get hurt, they automatically take the EFA test. And because of that, we have actually been on top of our claims."

Tipps noted that, on a personal level, Dr. Reaston is always available. "You can pick up the phone and always be able to talk to her at any time."

Added Jerry Suther at Heartland Express: "What Dr. Reaston has developed is encouraging because all that's often being used currently are radiology tests that can't specifically identify soft-tissue injuries per se. There are a lot of false positives involved with that and so the EFA can pinpoint whether or not a person has an acute injury and, if so, the specific injury to that muscle."

Suther noted his company has used the EFA technology to take baselines of its employees, creating a snapshot of an employee's current condition.

"So if they have a soft-tissue injury while working for us we can do a post-EFA test and then do a comparison between those two tests," he noted.

--By Steve Yahn

Giving People Their Lives Back

Dr. MaryRose Reaston, president of Tulsa, Okla.-based Emerge Diagnostics and founder of Insight Diagnostics Inc., has spent so much time finding ways to diagnose soft-tissue injury that she often feels like a physician.

Injured workers have often come up to Reaston and thanked her for her healing powers in the middle of a trade show. "People feel like they have their lives back," Reaston said.

Indeed they do. As anyone suffering from musculoskeletal damage to tendons, ligaments and muscles knows, such injuries are painful and tedious.

Diagnosing the damage isn't as easy as it sounds, and it's entrepreneurs like Reaston who move the industry forward. Her strategies and techniques to tackle the billion-dollar challenges posed by soft-tissue injuries may also yield benefits in the fight against other diseases like multiple sclerosis not normally associated with workers' comp.

Reaston, a founding member of the Nevada Disability Prevention Coalition, serves on the board of that organization. She is also a member of the International Society of Electrophysiology and Kinesiology.

-- By Cyril Tuohy

Senior Director of Safety & Risk Management
ARAMARK Uniform Services

Going Ergo

With a change in the texture and design of its laundry bags, ARAMARK Uniform Services employees are less susceptible to injury.


Under Carrie Williams, senior director of safety and risk management for ARAMARK Uniform Services, getting the "right minds in the room" for a roundtable on safety suggestions for her division led to a staggering 50 recommendations.

But there was no question what the No. 1 challenge was: to develop a laundry bag for the company's route carriers that was considerably lighter and that could be washed and dried more efficiently than traditional bags.

"What we were beginning to realize was that we'd been doing a really good job of bringing down the frequency of injury rates within our work group, however we continued to struggle with severity," observed Williams.

Route Sales Reps (RSRs) totaled about 25 percent of the uniform division's workforce but they represented about 80 percent of the group's severity claims.

"So we said, 'What is it about that job that is leading to more severe injuries on the whole compared to other groups of workers on a ratio basis>'" Williams said.

When the study group began looking more deeply into the issue, it recognized that the weight of the laundry bag was causing serious problems.

"Of all the recommendations the study group suggested, we tackled the ErgoBag challenge first because the old cotton bags were like a big heavy pillow," observed Williams. "I called them body bags because they often would weigh more than 100 to 120 pounds. Over time, handling these really had an impact on wrists and shoulders."

Williams noted that, once the study group started concentrating on reducing the weight of the bag, many other benefits flowed from it. For one, the lighter bags were a big advantage to the employees who had to care for the bags because they were made of a porous material that would allow them to vent and drain quicker and easier. This also led to a significant reduction in energy costs.

"By using a different type of material we didn't have to dry the heavy cotton bags," Williams noted.

In addition, the ErgoBag was equipped with multiple handles, allowing for a safer, more ergonomic grip. The ErgoBag also has a "belt loop" design, allowing for easy cord replacement, thereby saving significant time and labor costs.

As co-chair of the national Textile Rental Service Association Safety Committee, Williams was well positioned to recognize the seriousness of the industry-wide challenge created by traditional cotton laundry bags and the need to rethink the process.

Williams initiated this fresh approach by obtaining the sponsorship of President and COO Brad Drummond to create a cross-functional safety improvement team, which was vital to the effort, Williams said.

"Also, clearly my background in terms of understanding the importance of cross-functional efforts in solving any kind of problem came to bear on this project," Williams noted.

Said Debbie Rodgers, Philadelphia-based senior vice president, global risk management at ARAMARK: "Carrie is a terrific team leader. She really gets the importance of collaborating with others, seeking their input and finding a way to bring about a solution that meets the needs of all the constituents who are involved. And that's really the basis for the success of this product."

The ErgoBag pilot began in March 2011 and although it is still in its early stages of implementation, feedback has been extremely positive from Route Sales Reps, plant employees and the company's customers, Williams said. RSRs say they like the lighter and "easier to handle" bag because it provides relief to their backs, she said.

The long-term benefits of the ErgoBag are expected to be a significant reduction of cumulative trauma injuries associated with handling laundry bags, primarily for the RSRs but also for production workers in the company's cleaning facilities.

Although injury reduction data associated with the new bag is not yet available, the uniform services division plans to monitor injury data to help quantify the full impact of the ErgoBag.

"As a result of this project," Williams noted, "we gained efficiencies in terms of allowing people to do their work more quickly and even though some of these were not directly safety related, they benefitted the organization."

Drummond, president and COO, was certainly impressed.

"We greatly appreciate the team approach that Carrie employed through the cross-functional RSR Safety Improvement Team. I look forward to seeing additional innovative solutions that further improve the safety and welfare of our employees."

--By Steve Yahn

A Leader in Safety

Carrie Williams, senior director of safety and risk management for Aramark Uniform Services in Burbank, Calif., is a rare find. There are few women in top management positions in the laundry industry, and that makes her a role model to her peers and to those she mentors. She leads just by being where she is.

More than that, though, is the fact that she brings a lot of business acumen and experience to industry ranks still governed largely by technocrats. "You can empathize more with how the business leaders are facing, if you can speak their language you're way ahead," Williams said.

That's why she's a recipient this year of the Responsibility Leader® award, bestowed on innovators in risk management who have not only developed a unique and practical solution -- in her case a much lighter laundry bag -- but have ensured that the solution also benefits the community at large.

Williams recognizes the privilege and the responsibility of working for a large company. She's pushed her employer to share designs of automated wash floors, and helped the smaller employers fill out OSHA logs, and how to respond when their staffs come into contact with blood-borne pathogens.

--By Cyril Tuohy