Usability of manual handling guidance

The study was undertaken to examine the guidance provided in the Consultative Document “”Manual Handling of Loads. Proposals for Regulations and Guidance””. Five companies from different industrial sectors were selected to participate in the study. Company officials, the “”non-experts””, were asked to implement the manual handling regulations to establish how easy they were to use and to compare their use or interpretation with that of the “”experts””, the ergonomists. To help the non-expert a checklist was extracted from the regulations to assess those manual handling tasks deemed to be risky. Company sickness and accident data were examined to corroborate the assessments.The main findings showed that further guidance was needed in the interpretation of the checklist questions which required a value judgement. The checklist was found to be very helpful but a degree of risk was requested so tasks could be prioritised. Analysis of the checklist questions showed that about a quarter of question responses by the non-expert disagreed with the expert. Comparison between experts showed very good agreement. Examination of companies’ sickness and accident records showed the information was not in a suitable form to allow any analysis with the ergonomic assessment of manual handling risks. Recommendations on changes to the guidance and a proposed checklist were suggested and reported to Health and Safety Executive (HSE) prior to the completion of this report. “”