OSHA’s recent General Duty Clause (GDC) citation to an Amazon warehouse demonstrates that the agency is taking a more aggressive enforcement stance toward workplace ergonomic hazards.
Issued on April 18, 2023, the GDC citation alleges that Amazon’s handling of 10 employee injuries amounted to medical mismanagement that was likely to cause additional harm or impair recovery.
According to Keller & Heckman, the alleged medical mismanagement consisted of:
delaying evaluation, care and treatment of injured workers from a medical provider beyond onsite medical representatives, whose performance OSHA states was inadequate, and
prematurely returning injured workers to their regular jobs, resulting in worsening of the injury, exacerbating pain and impairing recovery from work-related injuries that required medical treatment.
The agency issued a similar GDC citation back in 2016 to a poultry processing plant based on medical mismanagement of unidentified employee injuries. But that citation was withdrawn as part of a formal settlement agreement.
So if you have onsite workplace clinics, it would be wise to ensure its worksites “have appropriate medical protocols (developed/reviewed by physicians with adequate knowledge of occupational medicine), which are documented and implemented with the required medical supervision and appropriate quality review.”
