According to the Occupational Safety Health Statistics by Labour Department [1], the manual handling injury has been the second highest number (20.8% among all injury cases, 7,928 reported cases in 2013) of injury category in Hong Kong in the past 10 years.  Employers are responsible for providing a healthy and safe environment to people in the workplace. This can be achieved by identifying and controlling the exposure to any hazard in the workplace and ensuring the persons in the workplace are free from the risk of death, injury or illness caused by workplaces and work tasks. The following information illustrates the workplace obligations of different parties, risk management process, risk identification, risk assessment and risk control of the manual tasks. Identifying risk factors is the first step to manage manual tasks. Risk factors are defined as “factors associated with the demands of a task that can contribute to or aggravate musculoskeletal disorders”. There are four contributing risk factors of manual tasks that are directly linked to different levels of task demands in a given manual task. The four risk contributing factors are 1) work area design, 2) tool use, 3) nature of loads and 4) loading handling whereas the work organization is a modifying risk factor.

In addition, the contributing risk factors and modifying risk factors corresponding to different levels of task demands, contribute to four categories of risks:

1) repetition,
2) force exertion,
3) working postures and
4) vibration.

In the manual handling risk management, these four categories of risk are main focus. Due to individual differences in physical capacity or health condition, the same task may bring up different adverse health effects to different staff. As a result, the risk management mechanisms should be developed according to the nature of tasks and the operators individually.

It is the time to review the manual tasks and develop for solutions on lowering the injury rate, call us now for solutions.

Contact us at telephone number 852 – 3625 2024852 – 3625 2024 or via e-mail to: enquiry@my-ergonomics.com for enquiry.

[1] Manual handling injury is referring to the “Injured whilst lifting or carrying” in the accident category on the Occupational Safety and Health statistics report published by the Labour Department of Hong Kong