Playing it safely: Liberty Mutual's Research Institute for Safety—celebrating its 50th birthday this month—has been at the forefront of the battle against occupational injuries in the United States. In the next 50 years, it will continue to flex its muscles around the world

Risk & Insurance, June, 2004 by Michelle Kerr

Off the beaten path in suburban Massachusetts, there is a serene patch of land located in the town of Hopkinton. It's a sleepy, verdant setting where one might expect to find a sprawling ranch or maybe a dairy farm full of heifers grazing in the midday sun.

But looks can be deceiving. This grassy spread is actually home to the Liberty Mutual Research Institute for Safety, a bustling, state-of-the-art hub of scientific activity known the world over for its contributions to the advancement of occupational injury research--with awards and honors too numerous to list. Thanks to its recent expansion, more than doubling hi size to 93,000 square feet, the Institute is now nearly as formidable in physical stature as it is in reputation.

More than 70 research projects are underway at any time, in field studies as well as within the walls of the Institute's 11 labs. Subjects are recruited from the real-world workforce and closely simulating actual work conditions.

AHEAD OF THE CURVE

The Institute was officially founded in 1954, but its origin dates much further back. The founders of Liberty Mutual, setting up shop in 1912, recognized the key role that safety could ultimately play in their ability to achieve their financial and philosophical goals.

As early as 1918, Liberty Mutual was making a significant investment in preventing occupational injuries, including funding a safety film called "The Outlaw," an 18-minute Chaplin-esque silent produced in conjunction with Paramount Pictures.

In those early years, Liberty Mutual had already enlisted the aid of full-time researchers to study the causes of workplace accidents and to develop preventive strategies. Their findings were cutting edge for the time, despite the fact that those hardy few labored away in the basement of Liberty Mutual's Boston headquarters.

Among those early breakthroughs was the development of machine guarding designs and recommendations that would become the basis for the American National Standards Institute machine guarding standards, as well as the standards still used by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

By 1954, the research arm had outgrown its accommodations and was relocated to a 1,000-square-feet building on its current home in Hopkinton. It had outgrown its status as a small department within the company and was given the official designation as the Liberty Mutual Research Center for Safety mid Health, the title it would keep until it was renamed in 2003.

Researchers took advantage of their expanded resources and turned their sights on the relatively unknown field of ergonomics. In the 1960s, researchers established the maximum acceptable weights and forces workers can lift, lower, push, pull or carry without excessive fatigue. This helped employers understand how to redesign job tasks to reduce workers' risk of injuries from overexertion.

In 1999, the Institute branched out. Liberty Mutual had long recognized that despite prevention, accidents were bound to happen and employers could benefit from understanding how to minimize the impact of workplace injuries. So it created the Center for Disability Research, an adjunct to its existing work, which became known as the Center for Safety Research.

"Our focus is to understand why people become disabled, how that can be prevented and what types of things are effective in not only preventing disability, but also helping people get back to work efficiently, quickly and safely--and to be able to sustain their return to work," says Glenn Pransky, director of the Center for Disability Research.

SCIENTIFIC ADVANTAGES

Though great advances have been made worldwide in the areas of workplace health and safety within the last 50 years, the Institute's mission remains unique in its focus on occupational injuries.

The Institute's director, Tom Leamon, is adamant on this point. "Every school of public health in the world and certainly in this country, has a significant program on occupational health ... but no research on occupational injury. Everyone has the impression that [occupational] illness is worse than injury, but if you look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, there are 400,000 new diseases a year, and 6 million new injuries. Someone ought to be paying attention to that."

It is also unique in that it is still the only facility of its kind funded by an insurance company. All other comparable organizations are either government entities or affiliates of universities.

The significance of that fact is not lost on those who make insurance decisions for their companies. "It is mystifying to me that more such institutes do not exist," says Beaumont Vance, a risk management specialist at Sun Microsystems in Broomfield, Colo. "Risk managers and underwriters alike often complain about loss history and extol the virtue of loss reduction. However, when it comes to developing and scientifically testing products that actually address the problems, the talk does not translate into action. But here is an insurance carrier that does put its money where its mouth is."