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Posted By Ian Stone
At a meeting today with Occ health doctors this subject was raised, half the room felt that RSI should be reported under RIDDOR (diseases section 8 cramp of hand due to repetitive movements) the other half felt that RSI has never been clinically diagnosed so should not be.
Over to you
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Posted By Ian Mycroft
The guidance to the regulations say that cramp is reportable where it is a chronic condition linked to repetitive work movements. An acute incident is not reportable.
If one of your workers is suffering from a real chronic RSI, or WRULD as some prefer to call it, they will not be capable of carrying out their normal duties for quite sometime, they may well even be off work. In this case it would be reportable anyway as an over-3-day injury.
By the way, it is wrong to say that RSI has never been clinically diagnosed, my wife has suffered from peri-tendinitis for a number of years and it was diagnosed by a consultant after a succession of visits to various hospitals over a period of months. It is, like any chronic RSI, very disabling and it started as an acute case of "cramp" which very quickly devloped into a chronic condition.
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Posted By Bryn Maidment
I think that such a dismissive view of these conditions is a throwback to the early civil claims made by sufferers. They generally failed because they claimed that the injury was a RSI. A repetitive strain injury is just a generic term for a large number of conditions and as such cannot be diagnosed because it doesn't exist.
A large number of claims do now succeed when a specific RSI is claimed for. The usual suspects, carpal tunnel, de Quervains Tenosynovitis are well known but a lot of others exist - thoracic outlet syndrome, Guyons Canal syndrome, Trigger finger & numerous Epicondylitis' (Tennis & Golfers elbow!)etc. The majority of these have specific symptoms and diagnoses and are very real , debilitating and painful for sufferers.
Regarding RIDDOR, these is no corresponding duty to report an RSI but there is the requirement, via conditions 8/9/10/11/12 & 13 of Schedule 3 if a proper diagnosis is made.
Only my 10p worth!
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Posted By Ian Stone
Im under the opinion that if the employee is suffering cramp due to repetative movements then it needs to be reported. The meeting was a highly charged affair! Its amazing how different doctors views vary WRULDS exists to some but not RSI and others it all exists
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Posted By Bryn Maidment
Ian
Completely agree with you on the cramp.
BTW if any of your Dr's don't believe, get them to talk to a good Orthopaedic or Rheumatoid Consultant. The key is to remember that the labels WRULD and RSI are generic and cover a large number of quite specific conditions.
Also get them to visit -
http://www.medicalmultimediagroup.com/opectoc.html
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Posted By Sean Fraser
Further information can also be found at:
www.rsi.org.uk
We had an interesting injury recently where an employee hurt his thumb against his car steering wheel and had to visit the doctor, who asked him if he used a laptop which he confirmed. The doctor then stated that the injury was exacerbated by use of the laptop which weakened his tnedons through what he described as "floating thumb" syndrome. I haven't been able to find the term anywhere else but the explanation certainly seemed to be reasonable - the user tries to avoid hitting the integral mousepad during use and as a result holds the thumbs well above the keyboard area while typing, thereby straining the tendons.
As a result of this injury, we are installing docking stations for use while in the office, to reduce the amount of time a user is exposed to this problem.
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Posted By John Ridd
Sean's posting and concerns about the risks from holding the thumb out of the way (when using a laptop) are given support by a Court Judgement made in support of the injured party (April 2000; Conaty -v- Barclays Bank)when the lady was found to have suffered De Quervain's Syndrome as a result of extensive numeric pad work while holding her right thumb 'out of the way'.
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