Save Your Hands! Consulting and Training
For Spas, Clinics and Educational Programs
Save Your Hands! offers a full range of injury prevention and ergonomics services in the U.S., Canada and worldwide, to practitioners, businesses that hire manual therapists, and schools that train them. Our team of experienced ergonomics and injury prevention specialists provides workshops, seminars, instructor training, ergonomics consulting and turn-key injury prevention solutions using the proven methods and techniques described in this book.
Workshops
Save Your Hands! Workshops provide practical information and useful techniques to help manual healthcare students and professionals prevent musculoskeletal injury, reduce fatigue and discomfort, and extend their careers. A school can request a workshop, or we can set up a workshop in a major city so more therapists can attend.
Attendees learn to reduce the physical demands of their work on their own bodies while still providing a thorough hands-on treatment to their clients. Each attendee receives a copy of Save Your Hands! Revised and Updated Second Edition.
Combining lecture and discussion with plenty of hands-on practice, the workshops are taught in an informal style that encourages active participation. Attendees come away from the workshop with an excellent overview of ergonomics and injury prevention principles, and a self-care action plan including recommended changes to their practice based on what they have learned.
Save Your Hands! Workshops are currently available for massage therapists and bodyworkers. A continuing education course for 10 contact hours will be available soon. Workshops for other manual healthcare professionals are in development.
Certified Injury Prevention Instructor Training
Qualified massage therapists can attend special, extensive training to become Certified Injury Prevention Instructors (CIPI) and teach Save Your Hands! Workshops to massage therapy and other manual therapy
professionals and students, in a spa setting, school or in workshops they set up themselves.
With the best-known name in injury prevention for manual therapists behind you, you will be able to help others in the manual therapy professions protect themselves from injury while obtaining a valuable credential and post-nominal (CIPI) and creating a new source of income for yourself. Continuing education credits will be available for this in-depth training. The CIPI training is ideal for lead therapists working in a spa or clinic, so they can help their practitioners learn how to prevent work-related MSDs or improve their knowledge. We encourage spas and clinics to designate a lead therapist to take this training to lead the injury prevention effort for their facility.
Save Your Hands! Consulting for Spas and Clinics
Spa and clinic management face the challenge of providing the best possible experience for their clients while also safeguarding the health of the massage therapists and estheticians who work for them. Creating a space that is beautiful and relaxing while remaining functional and ergonomically sound for practitioners can be challenging. The designer's selections for the decor or the wishes of owners or developers often dictate the choice and placement of equipment, and maintaining client comfort can seem to be in conflict with ensuring these workers' comfort and safety. Reconciling these often competing and conflicting priorities can seem complex and daunting.
When management joins forces with ergonomics and injury prevention professionals to find solutions, these conflicts become much easier to overcome. Each spa or clinic has its own particular set of challenges, due to the physical setup of the treatment facilities and the types of services they offer. All spas and clinics have the same concerns for staff: reduce turnover, minimize costly workers' compensation claims, improve productivity and enhance morale to increase retention and ensure that clients receive the best possible treatments from happy and healthy practitioners. All of these factors come together to make any spa or clinic more successful, and more attractive to potential hires.
One of the important recommendations we make is to take ergonomics into consideration in the pre-build design phase of a spa or clinic facility. We are fully able to consult with developers at this stage. It is much cheaper and easier to build facilities with the assistance of a professional ergonomist and injury prevention specialists than to have to change or retrofit equipment, rooms or flooring later. The relatively minimal cost of working with Save Your Hands! Consulting during the design process is trivial compared to the costs of making changes afterward. Solutions can be found that successfully reunite aesthetics for clients with staff safety and your design/build budget. Treatment staff can be more productive in a space that is designed for their comfort as well as the clients, and the savings on workers' comp claims and missed days due to injury can be quite significant. Training a lead therapist as a CIPI (left) to offer continuing oversight and assistance to staff provides helps ensure that your consulting effort has ongoing support. Of course, we are also available to consult with established spas and clinics. We also highly recommend that spas/clinics purchase a copy of Save Your Hands! for all staff members involved in treatment (bulk discounts are available).
Massage Therapy/Bodywork Schools and Training Programs
Save Your Hands! offers schools a multifaceted turn-key solution to help them minimize risk exposure for students and prepare them for the demanding profession that awaits them. We work closely with each school to develop an effective, self-sustaining, comprehensive injury prevention program. Using a train-the-trainer approach, we provide school staff with the necessary tools to integrate this program into their own, with follow-up and support. Schools that use Save Your Hands! as a recommended or required textbook and/or train an instructor to teach the principles and suggestions in the book get an Instructors’ Guide and Curriculum Guides, or custom-designed curricula if desired. Ergonomic evaluation of class and clinic workspaces is highly recommended to optimize them for student safety and comfort as they learn.
Benefits for schools include lowering the incidence of symptoms among students (who studies say are quite prone to injury), increasing students’ satisfaction with their program, and enhancing the image of the school for potential students.
Seminars, Lectures, Writing and Interviews
Lauriann Greene, author of Save Your Hands!, is available to speak at meetings and conferences of professional associations, as well as schools and businesses (including spas and clinics) about all aspects of injury prevention and ergonomics for manual therapists and provide a thorough understanding of injury risk factors, ergonomics concepts and injury prevention strategies.
Lauriann has written for all major industry publications and would be happy to contribute an article or blog post, or to be interviewed. We can also provide Save Your Hands! books as part of a promotion.