WHEN Mark Armstrong launched his business, Body Active Consultancy, in 1990, his clients were focused on rehabilitation rather than injury prevention
WHEN Mark Armstrong launched his business, Body Active Consultancy, in 1990, his clients were focused on rehabilitation rather than injury prevention.
For the first eight years of its operation, the two-person business would spend about 60 hours a week undertaking rehabilitation services for workers across a range of fields.
Now employing 14 people, BAC offers a variety of health and physical assessment options with a clear emphasis on early risk assessment and injury prevention.
Assessments include measures of neuromuscular strength and endurance tests as well as basic health assessments such as lifestyle history, heart rate, blood pressure, lung function, body composition, posture and cardio-respiratory fitness levels.
Mr Armstrong said health assessments had the full backing of a research and development team, with BAC regularly collaborating with health professionals on clients’ behalf.
Although the business started out focusing on rehabilitation work, and later offered health and wellbeing programs, Mr Armstrong discovered that the intangible nature of BAC’s services meant it was harder to “sell” the health and wellbeing message.
“So really, back then, it was all about getting people who were injured in the workplace, setting them up in a program, getting them physically rehabilitated and then working with the other rehabilitation providers, the doctor, the return-to-work provider, and collectively working together to get the person back to full-time work duties,” Mr Armstrong told WA Business News.
“The company started to grow so I took a couple of guys on and we had two or three full-time exercise physiologists helping us out.
“What I saw with the rehab model was that companies spend an awful lot of money but the outcomes that they got weren’t necessarily good or sustainable.
“I saw some really good examples of people returning to work, but unfortunately I saw some really poor examples of people not getting back to work when they should’ve and there was no particular reason why not.
“I believe the system at that time facilitated it, it was full of holes and if you knew how to play or work the system, you could do it.”
In 1997-98 Mr Armstrong investigated musculoskeletal injury prevention, looking at ways to reduce workplace injuries by focusing on manual handling techniques.
BAC began looking at health and wellness and the continuum shifted from rehabilitation, or reactive focused, to a more proactive and prevention model.
But Mr Armstrong said there was a lack of understanding and some scepticism with regards to the issues surrounding health and wellbeing and injury prevention.
“I basically opened a whole can of worms,” Mr Armstrong said.
“But I just felt at that time without knowing anything, there was a better way of doing it.
“So I took it upon myself, much to the fright of everybody else, that we would change our focus and we would become a company based on prevention of musculoskeletal injuries.”
BAC began working with companies to implement systems and processes that would prevent employees from injury.
Although manual handling injuries cost the country an estimated $20 billion each year, Mr Armstrong struggled to convince employers that injury prevention would not only save money, but would reduce workers’ compensation and downtime.
It took almost four years before BAC won a major contract.
“The breaking point came when I got an introduction to Brambles,” he said.
“So we took it upon ourselves to mandate the way they thought about injuries, and about three years later we reduced their rehabilitation client list by 400 per cent; we got it down from 370 down to about 70.”
Mr Armstrong said Brambles was instrumental in allowing BAC to experiment with its processes and refine how its systems could be implemented in the workplace.
“We then re-jigged the business a second time, so rather than have two major focuses – health and wellbeing and musculoskeletal health – we focused just on musculoskeletal health,” he said.
“And the reason for that was that musculoskeletal health, or what people commonly call manual handling, is an enormous ongoing problem in the majority of industries; it accounts for about 40 per cent of all injuries.
“So that’s really our entry point into the company [client].”
Although the process has been slow, BAC has built a strong reputation during the past 19 years, with some clients working with the business for eight years.
Mr Armstrong said one client had reduced its workers compensation direct cost from $370,000 in 2002 to $5,000 in 2009.
BAC has now undertaken a national manual-handling program with Coates Hire and has a proposal being assessed by John Holland, with a further 13 pending contracts with other businesses.
