MANUAL HANDLING
— WHAT TO LOOK FOR NOW? Jeremy Trotman, Senior Hygienist, JTA Health, Safety + Noise
In 2014 Safe Work Australia published some good news statistics: 2011–12 — serious workers compensation claims with “muscular stress while lifting, carrying, or putting down objects” listed as the mechanism of injury were down on the previous year by 21%. Even better, this was no statistical aberration; it reflected a general downward trend since 2000–01.
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n addition, the number of back-related serious claims has fallen by 21% between 2000–01 and 2010–11, and the proportion of back-related claims of all serious claims has fallen from 27% in 2000–01 to 23% in 2010–11. If these were economic statistics, politicians would be crowing over “a beautiful set of numbers”; however, OHS people should be more cautious, because the statistics still tell us that manual handling-related injury is a (and arguably “the”) major occupational cause of body stress-type claims and the back is still the most frequent injury site. What these statistics may be telling us is that the measures that we have been pursuing — measures that have been around since the early 1980s, the legislative levers, barrage of codes, information/fact sheets, professional prescriptions and resultant actions taken by employers and workers — are preventing lifting, carrying-type injury. The picture does not look as rosy for the other two mechanisms of injury under body stressing with: “muscular stress while handling objects other than lifting, carrying or putting down” showing a slight decrease over 2011–12 but a 3% rise over the preceding
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years since 2000; and “muscular stress with no objects being handled” having a 5% rise over the same period. At 25 claims, these two mechanisms of injury account for over half of the total number of claims in the body stressing category. So perhaps we need to focus more on casting the hazard identification net, risk assessment and control beyond the lifting and carrying tasks to those where we do not seem to be getting the same positive results. Based on the claim numbers, it would seem that jobs involving pushing, pulling and other actions need our attention now just as much as lifting and carrying. This might require a slight change in focus for hazard identification and risk assessment action, including training. For the most part, control strategies should remain essentially the same. Driven by the regulations, the control hierarchy will still apply and it is hoped that its increased acceptance in the workplace, allied with the ever-expanding range of higher order engineering devices designed to reduce manual handling risk, shall lead to a parallel reduction in injuries.
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