Toolkit

A major cause of MSDs is poor manual handling. This can occur when people are inexperienced or untrained and when they fail to plan a task properly.

Other problems relate to the risk assessments conducted on such tasks, particular tasks that may not seen onerous but which are either repeated regularly or involve twisting and turning into unusual or awkward postures.

To help employers properly assess tasks the HSE has produced a series of tools to allow a task to be better assessed.

The tools are split by the type of task, but you should bear in mind that for some tasks you may have to consider using more than one tool.

The current suite of tools covers

• The Manual Handling Assessment Chart – Mac tool - is used to assess the risks posed by lifting, lowering, carrying and team manual handling activities. It is designed to help you understand, interpret and categorise the level of risk of the various known risk factors associated with manual handling activities.

• The Assessment of Repetitive Tasks – ART tool - is designed to help assess repetitive tasks involving the upper limbs. It assesses some of the common risk factors in repetitive work that contribute to the development of upper limb disorders.

Both of these tools incorporate a numerical and a colour coding score system to highlight high risk tasks.

• The Pushing and Pulling tool is designed to take you through the issues that you need to consider. Push pull tasks can often be ignored because they are often seen as solutions for manual handling – put the load onto a trolley and push it – but there are still issues of distance, uneven surfaces, obstructions, slopes/stairs etc.