Development of an Occupational Health Safe Return to Work Prototype Application and Ergonomics Dataset for Agricultural Tasks

Abstract

Serious, restrictive, non-fatal injuries are commonplace in large animal agriculture including in pork and dairy production. Primary care clinicians often have few resources to facilitate workers’ return to work and have difficulties communicating work restrictions/limitations to workers and their employers. This project developed SafeReturnToWork.org, a web-based platform to aid physicians and farmers in farmworkers’ timely and safe return to work. This prototype characterizes the duties of dairy and pork workers, and facilitates the creation of applicable light duty job assemblies for farmers and farmworkers by physicians and other healthcare providers. Guided by interviews and focus groups with physicians, farmers, and farmworkers, the system was developed for use with workplace injuries that could eventually link to human resource department systems, an electronic health record, or expand to other industries beyond agriculture.

Keywords

• occupation
• injury
• return to work
• farmer
• farmworker
• agriculture
• ergonomics