Your ergonomic risk assessment team should be multidisciplinary. Everyone on the team should have roles and responsibilities that are clearly and regularly communicated. Each team member should be held accountable.
Selecting a common set of ergonomic risk assessment methods and tools keeps everyone on the same page and ensures consistent, reliable data and a one-to-one comparison across sites, departments, jobs, and tasks. Bad data can be worse than no data at all. Employers are responsible for providing a safe and healthful workplace for their workers. In the workplace, the number and severity of MSDs resulting from physical overexertion, and their associated costs, can be substantially reduced by applying ergonomic principles.
Implementing an ergonomic process is effective in reducing the risk of developing MSDs in high-risk industries as diverse as construction, food processing, firefighting, office jobs, healthcare, transportation and warehousing. The following are important elements of an ergonomic process:. Note : An ergonomic process uses the principles of a safety and health program to address MSD hazards.
Such a process should be viewed as an ongoing function that is incorporated into the daily operations, rather than as an individual project. There is a tension in ergonomics between pinpoint accuracy and a tool that is practical enough for everyday practice.
You likely have hundreds of jobs to evaluate and there is only so much time in the day. You need a tool set that is practical enough to use and also accurate enough to trust. This set of tools follows the best practices and selection criteria outlined above and they work together to give you all the tools you need to assess risk in your workplace. The ErgoPlus Job Screen was developed to provide a quick and simple method to screen jobs with a goal of identifying job tasks that have moderate or high-risk levels for musculoskeletal disorders.
The Job Screen tool has three primary outputs. First, the job screen score on the top line of the results page provides an overall risk score at the job level, which can be used to quantify the overall risk of the job and to compare jobs across a department or facility wide.
Second, the body segment scores displayed both numerically and graphically are an indication of the level of risk for each body segment evaluated. And third, difficult job tasks are identified and saved so they can be evaluated further.
The NIOSH Lifting Equation is a tool used by occupational health and safety professionals to assess the manual material handling risks associated with lifting and lowering tasks in the workplace.
This equation considers job task variables to determine safe lifting practices and guidelines. The primary product of the NIOSH lifting equation is the Recommended Weight Limit RWL , which defines the maximum acceptable weight load that nearly all healthy employees could lift over the course of an 8 hour shift without increasing the risk of musculoskeletal disorders MSD to the lower back.
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