[ Focus: Health and safety ] Regulations
Under the Manual Handling Operations Regulations 1992, as amended in 2002, employers have a legal obligation to make ‘a sufficient and suitable assessment of the risks to employees from the manual handling of loads’. The regulations set out a hierarchy of measures that should be followed to reduce risks, which are:
nAvoiding manual handling operations as far as is reasonably practicable;
nAssessing any operations that cannot be avoided; and
nReducing the risk of injury as far as is reasonably practicable.
In addition, the employer should not only assess
the task in isolation but also the individuals that will be required to undertake the task. Account should be taken of the capabilities of an individual and whether the task creates a hazard to an individual that may be pregnant or have health problems. With regards to training, Regulation 13(2) of the Management of Heath and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 requires every employer to provide employees with adequate health and safety information and training. This should be supplemented as necessary with more specific information and training on manual handling injury risks and prevention.
Training There is no set guidance on what manual handling training should include but it should, of course, be relevant to the workers concerned, the tasks they have to undertake and the environment(s) in which they operate. The regulations don’t set specific requirements such as weight limits but rather recommend what is described as the ergonomic approach, making an assessment on a range of relevant factors to determine the risk of injury and identify possible remedial action. Ergonomics can be described as ‘fitting the job to the person, rather than the person to the job’. All this may sound like yet another administrative
burden to be borne. It is understandable that attention and resources may be focused on the avoidance of serious incidents, such as electric shock, and this is, of course, essential. However, in pure financial terms, smaller less-serious injuries resulting in lost time are far more likely to impact on your business. Training is available from a wide variety of
sources. Good starting points are the ECA, HSE and RoSPA websites. The HSE site sets out all of the requirements and has links to a number of relevant publications, while RoSPA offers a range of free material aimed at making employees risk aware and providing risk assessment guidelines. There are also specialist consultants who will tailor training around the tasks that workers are involved in.
About the author
Ian Hollingworth is claims manager for the Electrical Contractors’ Insurance Company (ECIC)
Covered Employers are required to provide their employees with relevant and sufficient training, and to make them aware of forseeable risks – though, of course, no one can forsee everything that might happen on site. However, if relevant training has been carried out – and properly documented – the employer has a much sturdier defence if a claim does arise. Manual handling is a vast subject, and training is definitely an area to which more attention should be paid. And not just as a one- off activity – it is equally important that recorded refresher training is provided on an annual or two-yearly basis, to prevent bad habits creeping in. Training does not always mean a course, but whatever is delivered should be practically useful (and recorded). Smaller operators may often be put off by the
cost of training, but the risks are the same whatever the size of your business and, in relative terms, the cost impact of workers suffering injury could be very much higher. Ultimately, an investment of time and/or money in training could save money in the long term, whatever the size of your business, by helping to reduce lost time and all of the costs that it involves.
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ex.com/trunking 01424 856600 March 2013 ECA Today 43
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