Development of a screening method for manual handling

More than a quarter of the accidents reported each year to the enforcing authorities in the UK are associated with the manual handling of loads. Many more injuries occur gradually, with progressive wear and tear damaging the back,until incapacity results. As a result of European and UK National Legislation, employers are to be required to assess manual handling operations for risks to safety and health and to take steps to reduce such risks. In the Coal and SteelCommunities of the CEC, guidance has been produced to aid employers to identify ways and means of achieving that risk reduction. This document has been produced as an aid to employers in identifying where such risk reduction is required. It draws together the results from scientific attempts worldwide to quantify the strains arising from manual handling to produce a simple screening method.The method is based upon the application of a checklist – inevitably fairly lengthygiven the complexity of factors influencing safe manual handling. After completion, the checklist entries are used to identify a series of multipliers, which are in turn used to derive a safe load for a given handling task. This can be used to compare against the actual task load in order to establish whether or not the load is acceptable.Although ad-hoc preliminary applications had suggested that the checklist was relatively straightforward, formal trials with British Coal staff who received a minimal amount of training indicated problems with its use. Poor inter- and intra-individual repeatability produced inconsistent results and it remains to be seen whether this difficulty can be rectified with training. A more fundamental problem was that, even when applied by experts in its use (those responsible for its production and testing) it did not reliably indicate potential risk. Compared against the objective measurement of intra-abdominal pressure (IAP) it generally over-estimated the risk of injury. Although it is recognised that the IAP technique for quantifying truncal strain does have its detractors previous attempts to quantify risk mathematically (notably the equation produced by NIOSH) have similarly tended to result in an overestimation of that risk. Care should be taken in applying numerical limits without recognising their limitations and potential inaccuracies. “”