Employers have a legal responsibility to ensure that employees are safeguarded against injury risks when carrying out hazardous manual handling tasks in the workplace, including lifting, pushing, pulling, carrying or moving loads of some kind.
Under the law, organisations are expected to ensure that workers can avoid hazardous manual handling as far as is reasonably practicable, while working to reduce injury risks to as low as possible.This means that a risk assessment must be carried out so that these injury risks can be prevented as far as is reasonably practicable when manual handling operations can’t be avoided.
So, with this in mind:
What do you need to include in a manual handling risk assessment?
One of the biggest work factors associated with occupational musculoskeletal disorders is manual handling, with an estimated 511,000 employees experiencing some kind of issue in this regard for 2024/2025 period.
From a business perspective (as well as a human one), this is certainly worth addressing since it has a big impact on productivity, with Health & Safety Executive figures showing that musculoskeletal disorders result in an estimated 7.1 million working days lost each year.
For 2024/2025, work-related musculoskeletal disorders were responsible for 27 per cent of all cases of occupational ill health and 20 per cent of all associated working days lost.
To address this, make sure you include the following when putting your risk assessments together:
- Task frequency
- Load weight
- The required posture to carry out the task
- How far loads must be transported, lifted or lowered
- The nature of the load (sharp, hot, slippery etc)
- Floor surface
- The amount of space in the work area
- Lighting
- Temperature
- Individual strength, fitness and general health/medical conditions
What are the benefits of taking the NEBOSH HSE Certificate In Manual Handling Risk Assessment?
Taking this NEBOSH course would be hugely beneficial for managers, team leaders and health and safety professionals that want to understand and manage the risks associated with manual handling.
A one-day qualification, the training programme is based on the HSE’s best practice guidance and tools, ensuring that you can identify and assess risks appropriately, putting controls in place to protect members of staff.
Upon completion, you will be able to:
- Understand your responsibilities related to manual handling
- Explain risk reduction importance to others
- Explain manual handling risks and how they can cause injury
- Practice appropriate risk assessment technique
- Apply wider risk management elements for manual handling
It should take around seven hours of study to complete this particular course, with six hours of teaching (either virtually or in person) and one hour for the assessment itself.
Once this course is complete, you could naturally progress further onto other one-day courses, including health and safety leadership, incident investigation and environmental awareness.
If you’d like to find out more, get in touch with ACT today.
