A Longitudinal Study of Workers with Work-Related Musculoskeletal Disease after Relocation to Redesigned work Stations

This paper presents a longitudinal study on the return to the workforce of employers with WMSDs of the upper limbs and their reallocation to jobs with “low exposure”. The study started 5 years ago with 100 workers affected by WMSDs and includes now 180 affected workers operating in the same factory. The trial involved: definition of criteria for characterising jobs for affected workers; classifying WMSDs workers according to the type and severity of the disorders. The results, 5 years after the start of the trial, are encouraging and show that when the affected workers return in jobs that full meet the defined criteria, a significant prevalence of improvements are reported.