Glasgow Business . 41
www.glasgowchamberofcommerce.com
organisations carry out risk assessments to protect their employees and their botom line. Douglas added: “In my experience as a
health and safety legal advisor, I’ve always thought that manual handling has not been taken as seriously as it should and, in many sectors, I do not believe organisations are fully compliant. “Health and safety training is given to
employees but it’s the robust risk assessment of individual manual handling tasks that is missing in many instances.” Douglas argues that many assessments
do not go far enough. HSE regulations want organisations to consider the whole of the task, which goes under the acronym of TILE: Task, Individual, Load and Environment. Te task, training and load characteristics
may be relatively straightforward, but the environment could be a much more complex arena to assess. For example, consider all the risks associated with taking a load from the back of a truck on a pallet and negotiating all the hazards in the journey to get it from the vehicle, across the street and pavement, and through a shop to the store room. Douglas added: “If the documentation
behind the risk assessment is not robust enough then an organisation will find it difficult to defend a potential liability claim and this may result in a heſty fine. “Tat’s why I believe that using the
recently updated HSE risk assessment tools offers businesses the best protection for both themselves and their employees.”
UK Work-Related Musculoskeletal Disorder Statistics (WRMSDs) in 2016
• Total WRMSDs cases (prevalence): 539,000
• Represents 41% of all work-related illnesses
• The number of new cases of WRMSDs (incidence): 176,000 – a rate of 550 cases per 100,000 people
• WRMSDs (incidence) rate has been broadly flat for the last five years
• An estimated 8.8 million working days were lost due to WRMSDs – an average of 16 days lost for each case
• WRMSDs account for 34% of all working days lost due to work related ill health
• Higher rates of WRMSDs found in the following sectors: agriculture, forestry and fishing, construction, transportation and storage, human health and social work activities
• The occupations that have statistically significantly higher WRMSDs rates: skilled trade occupations and process/ machine operatives
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