Top Tips to Avoid Back Injuries In The Workplace

Expert Insight:

Stuart Halliday CMIOSH a Chartered safety and health practitioner and Offshore Medic, works with the Mintra team to advise on our Health and Safety courses and ensures that course content is compliant with industry standards and relevant to our end users. He gives us his expert advice and top tips on best practice manual handling:

“Unfortunately, I have experienced incidents in manual handling many times. One that comes to mind was a job that required a large blank plate to be taken from one part of a work site to another for use on the plant. A JCB was due to come in the next morning to move the blank due to its size and weight. When I returned to site the next morning, the blank had been put into position without the use of any mechanical aids. In this case nobody was injured but it is an excellent example of a near miss and those involved were incredibly lucky. There are countless other examples where others were not so lucky.

Had the individuals asked the questions detailed in the training material, they would have identified that the weight of the blank was far too heavy to move by hand. This ties into site culture, which is another topic, but I like to think that the right instruction and training would at least have had the work party question what they were doing.

WRMSDs are a significant cause of absence in the industry and I feel that sometimes manual handling can be overlooked when planning tasks, because more focus is given to what are considered higher risk activities.”

Next Steps:

Visit the HSE toolbox for a brief guide and top tips on Manual Handling in the Workplace:

http://www.hse.gov.uk/toolbox/manual.htm

The Mintra ‘Manual Handling’ course is a good reminder for everyone on the importance of using correct techniques and asking the question, “Do we need to manually lift this?”

Learn more about ‘Manual Handling’ by completing our accredited online manual handling course.