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Background Low back injuries are common and costly, accounting for 15 to 25 percent of injuries covered by workers' compensation and 30 to 40 percent of the payments made under that program. The high costs of injury, the lack of effective treatment, and the evidence that there are behavioral risk factors have led to widespread use of employee education programs that teach safe lifting and handling. The effectiveness of those programs, however, has received little rigorous evaluation.
Methods We evaluated an educational program designed to prevent low back injury in a randomized, controlled trial involving about 4000 postal workers. The program, similar to that in wide use in so-called back schools, was taught by experienced physical therapists. Work units of workers and supervisors were trained in a two-session back school (three hours of training), followed by three to four reinforcement sessions over the succeeding few years. Injured subjects (from both the intervention and the control groups) were randomized a second time to receive either training or no training after their return to work.
Results Physical therapists trained 2534 postal workers and 134 supervisors. Over 5.5 years of follow-up, 360 workers reported low back injuries, for a rate of 21.2 injuries per 1000 worker-years of risk. The median time off from work per injury was 14 days (range, 0 to 1717); the median cost was $204 (range, zero to $190,380). After their return to work, 75 workers were injured again. Our comparison of the intervention and control groups found that the education program did not reduce the rate of low back injury, the median cost per injury, the time off from work per injury, the rate of related musculoskeletal injuries, or the rate of repeated injury after return to work; only the subjects' knowledge of safe behavior was increased by the training.
Conclusions A large-scale, randomized, controlled trial of an educational program to prevent work-associated low back injury found no long-term benefits associated with training.
Source Information
From the Robert Breck Brigham Multipurpose Arthritis and Musculoskeletal Diseases Center (L.H.D., M.D.I., M.G.L., R.L., E.W., A.H.F., M.H.L.) and the Department of Rheumatology–Immunology (L.H.D., M.G.L., R.L., M.H.L.), Brigham and Women's Hospital; the Department of Medicine, Harvard Medical School (L.H.D., R.L., E.W., M.H.L.); Harvard School of Public Health (L.H.D., M.G.L., J.R., M.H.L.); the Department of Physical Therapy, Boston Bouvé College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, Northeastern University (M.D.I.); the Evans Department of Medicine, Boston University School of Medicine (M.G.L., R.L.); and the U.S. Postal Service (J.R., C.Z.) — all in Boston; the Framingham Heart Study, Framingham, Mass. (M.G.L.); and the University of Iowa Injury Prevention Research Center, Iowa City (C.Z.).
Address reprint requests to Dr. Daltroy at the RBB Multipurpose Arthritis and Musculoskeletal Diseases Center, Brigham and Women's Hospital PBB-B2, 75 Francis St., Boston, MA 02115.
Related Letters:
An Educational Program to Prevent Disabling Low Back Pain
Schwartz E., Yodaiken R. E., Sokas R., Berke J. H., Daltroy L. H., Iversen M. D., Liang M. H., Hadler N. M.
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Full Text
N Engl J Med 1997;
337:1923-1925, Dec 25, 1997.
Correspondence
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