Dr Alistair Bromhead's Guide to the HSE Manual Handling Tools

ASHTEAD, U.K. - Nov. 27, 2018 - PRLog -- The Health and Safety Executive has developed a range of interactive tools to help identify manual handling risks in the workplace. All of the tools are free and provide useful guidance on making these important assessments.

Dr Alistair Bromhead, founder of Alistair Bromhead Ltd, a nationwide provider of health and safety training, says that it can be very difficult to agree on what might constitute a low, medium or high risk. "However," he says, "The HSE guides do give helpful descriptions as to what would represent each of these based on a wide range of issues."

Dr Bromhead explains how the HSE tools work.

"The MAC tool has been developed to assess the risks posed by lifting, carrying and lowering manual handling activities. It is designed to help understand, interpret and categorise the levels of risks into low, medium or high using a colour coding and numerical score system. The tool is split into single person and team handling issues. Having identified the level of risk, a decision can be made as to whether further control measures should be investigated and ergonomic improvements introduced."

"The V-Mac tool is designed to be used alongside the MAC tool. It's for assessing lifting and carrying risks where loads weights vary. Typical scenarios where this tool would prove useful are order picking, parcel sorting and trailer loading and unloading.

"Because it can be difficult and time consuming to obtain the weights of each item a handler will deal with in any given time period, the V-MAC tool is best used alongside order picking and distribution systems that automatically generate the weights of items. Those weights are then imported into the V-MAC worksheets."

"The ART tool is designed to assess the risks associated with repetitive upper limb tasks. This is a particularly useful tool as it looks at repetitive strain issues where non-neutral positions and repetition are key risk factors. It allows issues to be identified that would normally fall through a traditional manual handling risk assessment.

"Once a full assessment has been conducted using the ART tool, the guide also provides a system for interpreting the overall result, along with any need for further action."

"The RAPP tool concentrates on the movement of loads by pushing and pulling. Not all push and pull loads involve wheels, so the guide is split into wheeled and non-wheeled push-pull activities. Non-wheeled examples would be the dragging of white goods; the sliding of a table or the churning of a barrel."

Manual Handling Risk Assessment Course

Dr Bromhead says it is good practice to use the tools, because if the HSE were to be onsite and asking questions about manual handling risk assessments, then it would be much easier to justify decisions made that were based upon HSE guidance.

Concluding, he says: "All of the HSE tools form an integral part of our one-day Manual Handling Risk Assessment course. This course is typically run in-house, allowing us to visit genuine areas of work to allow real-life practice assessments on actual operations."

To learn more about manual handling risk assessor certificate course offered by Alistair Bromhead Ltd visit http://www.abromhead.co.uk/manual-handling-risk-assessor.asp, or to make a booking, call 0800 710 1099 or email info@abromhead.co.uk.