COVER STORY
UNDER PRESSURE
Here, the Royal Society of Prevention of Accidents offers advice on how ergonomic risk assessment can help to avert manual handling injuries in the workplace.
Manual handling, it’s such an innocuous term describing a seemingly innocuous action. Yet without proper training and ergonomic workplace design, it can lead to a variety of musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs). In fact, according to the Health and Safety Executive, manual handling causes over a third of all workplace injuries and currently affects one million people a year, costing society £5.7 billion. MSDs affect the muscles, joints, tendons and other parts of the musculoskeletal system, causing pain and damage in the arms, legs,
back, shoulders and neck as well as a variety of repetitive strain injuries.
Last year, a 54-year-old library assistant was instructed by her employer to help move 80,000 books from one area of the library to another over a four-month period. She was told to lift stacks of books and pack them into boxes – weighing up to 22kg each. These were then loaded onto trolleys and taken to their new destination
The librarian had not been trained in manual handling techniques and consequently developed back pain from the persistent heavy lifting. She told her manager about the pain and took three days off to rest, however, on returning to work she was told to carry on with moving the boxes.
Her back pain became so severe that her back seized up altogether. Despite seeking treatment from a specialist pain clinic to help her to manage the discomfort, she continues to suffer from chronic back pain, which prevents her from working. Her local authority employer did not offer her alternative light duties and she was subsequently dismissed on grounds of medical incapability.
She said: “I never had any problems with my back before lifting those
12
boxes but now I have to adapt my life around managing the pain.
“The fact that my employers denied they were to blame for my injuries and the end of my career was particularly galling. I planned to carry on working until retirement to help pay for my daughter’s university tuition fees but that’s no longer an option for me.”
PREVENTING MANUAL
HANDLING INJURIES Such cases should not occur and are not acceptable, and they could be prevented by proper ergonomic risk assessments of all manual handling operations.
The Manual Handling Operations Regulations 1992 (as amended) apply to all work that involves lifting, lowering, pushing, pulling or carrying and they establish the following clear hierarchy of control measures:
• Hazardous manual handling operations should be completely avoided if at all possible, for example, by redesigning the task to avoid moving the load or by automating or mechanising the process.
• If that is not possible, suitable and sufficient assessment of any hazardous manual handling operations must be carried out. This is particularly important in a
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