40 . Glasgow Business February 2017
Risk assessments protect your business and staff TOP PRIORITY SAFETY SHOULD BE W
hether an employee is picking up a pack of A3 paper from the stationery cupboard or loading a pallet of goods into
a retailer’s stock room, each and every practice of manual handling that they regularly undertake has to be risk assessed. If an injury happens and, as an employer you can’t show evidence of this assessment, then the organisation will be open to an injury claim. Manual handling injuries – also known as
work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WRMSD) – account for more than a third of all work-related illnesses in the UK. According to statistics from the Labour Force Survey, an estimated 8.8 million working days were lost due to WRMSDs – an average of 16 days lost for each case. Tese injuries not only cause considerable
pain and discomfort to employees but they also impact the operational effectiveness of a business. Te organisation will lose a valuable and skilled employee while they recover from the injury and the company may not be able to fully utilise their skills when they return to work if they are put on lighter duties while they recover fully. And there is the risk of legal action from injury claims. By law, employers are required to reduce
the risk of manual handling accidents at work and, where possible, the need for employees to undertake such work which involves a risk of them being injured.
of Repetitive Tasks – ART tool). Depending on the task, you may find it
helpful to use more than one tool. For example, you may need to pick up a box of items (liſting), carry it to a workstation (carrying), then distribute the contents to other locations such as pigeonholes or a filing cabinet (repetitive movements). Douglas Cameron, Head of Health &
Safety at Law at Work, is concerned that not enough atention is paid to manual handling assessment within organisations and sees the updated HSE guides as an ideal way for companies to make their health and safety assessments more robust. He said: “While I admit the new manual
handling guides take a litle bit of geting used to, it is really worth the effort because they provide a simple and straightforward way of assessing your overall health and safety risk profile. “Tere are two benefits from using the
To do this they must carry out manual
handling risk assessments prior to any tasks, and also provide training on equipment and techniques to be used when carrying out a manual handling task. Tey must also assess the individual capability of employees to reduce manual handling risks to as low as possible. However, this assessment has been made
easier with the recent update of the Health & Safety Executive’s (HSE) manual handling guides, which provide employers with simple and effective tools to assess and then mitigate the risk of various manual-handling activities. HSE has developed tools
to help employers analyse liſting, carrying and team handling (the manual handling assessment charts – MAC tool), and pushing and pulling (the risk assessment of pushing and pulling – RPP tool) and repetitive upper limb tasks (the Assessment
MAC, RPP and ART tools: firstly, the images and charts provide an easy way to assess your work practices; and, secondly, it means that you have robust evidence that you have conducted a full manual handling risk assessment using HSE-approved tools.” Te incidence of new manual handling
incidents has shown no sign of decreasing in recent years, having remained around the 175,000 per year mark, so it’s vital
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