house design queenslander plans

many people may not realise that workplacerelated sprain and strain injuries are a really huge problem across the state. in actual fact,of the eighty-five thousand plus workplace injuries in queensland each year, more thansixty percent are sprain and strain injuries. what’s even more concerning is that thisproblem isn’t even going away, it’s getting worse. and many of these injuries could havebeen easily prevented. sure we realise each workplace is unique,and as such there’s no one size fits all solutions to prevent these type of injuries.but as you’ll see in this film there are some practical, simple and relatively inexpensivethings you can do in your workplace to help reduce your risk of sprain and strain injuries.

anything that involves physical exertion,i would say is a manual task. it’s a job that requires human effort. lifting manually by yourself, without thecranes and that. anything using your hands or… packing pallets. loading pallets. unloadingpallets and all that sort of stuff. a lot of people think manual tasks is justabout heavy lifting and carrying. but there’s loads more to it than that, if you’ll pardonthe pun. manual tasks are those workplace activitiesthat require the use of force exerted by a person to grasp, manipulate, strike, throw, carry, move – as in lift/lower/push/pull,

hold or restrain an object, load or body part.phew!! a sprain or strain is a term that doctorsuse when they’re talking about something that’s not broken. so it’s a soft tissueinjury and that doesn’t mean it’s not serious and doesn’t mean it’s going toget better quickly because often they don’t. most people i see are not from heavy lifting,the sprains and strains are more from accumulative effect of the work duties that they do. whichmight include doing things repetitively, or doing things that are forceful and also ifthey do them for a long time during the course of the day. i was actually in the process of lifting asixty kilogram cake, which is a compressed,

washed linen and i realised pretty well straightaway that there was a problem. when i was younger, i worked hard. i was oneof the boys. let’s get into, let’s get it done. the pain was pretty bad. it was somethingi’ve never experienced before. and it all added up that when i got olderthen this injury i’ve got is going to be with me for the rest of my life. half of the problem with sprain and straininjuries is that people think they’re a bit of a non-issue, but many of them are veryserious and can have a huge impact. it impacts you on doing your activities indaily living that you need to do. also what

you might need to do in your workplace. the biggest impact of this injury has beenthe change to my lifestyle. it was painful enough… painful enough tostop me from doing some of the normal duties that i was before that. i can’t do sport anymore, that’s justa no-no. i used to enjoy doing cricket umpiring. not on. i can’t stand out in the field.activities with the family, not on. maintenance around the house, i can’t do that. there is an economic impact that they’renot making as much money as what they would if they were at work. and then that then cancause them a lot of stress and stress on the

family, and on the children as well. and thenthat can lead further on to marriage breakdown, people losing their house. and that’s notan uncommon thing. painkillers, well they’re a part of lifenow whether i like it or not, i’ve got to take them. if i don’t take them wellthen everybody else suffers for it because sometimes i’m not a nice person to get alongwith. i got off pretty easily i think when comparedto other people. i would never had thought in a hundred yearsthat i would suffer from this so much. i think about how lucky i’ve been all thetime. you know, i think of how much worse it could have been.

a sprain or a strain not only affects theinjured worker, but it can have a serious impact on the workplace too. well it affects everything. all the otherworkers, because they’re left to take up the slack and probably have to work that bitharder until you can organise replacements and that sort of thing. depending on the levelof worker, obviously, if it’s someone who’s been here a while you lose a lot of knowledge.managers then of course tend to pull their hair out because their production’s outof whack. so once your production’s down, your finances obviously and given the wayeconomics are at the moment that’s not a good thing for any industry to have to copewith.

it’s good to see something that’s actuallysuable and understandable, even for people like me. and that you can include the guysdown the back. although a lot of workplace activities aremanual tasks, not all of them are likely to cause an injury. there’s heaps of ways toidentify which manual tasks are risky and what you can do about them. while some riskassessment tools can appear complex, i’m going to walk you through a simple and reallypractical tool that you can use in your workplace. it’s called perform. at the risk of scaringyou off it stands for: participative ergonomics for manual tasks. yep, that’s a bit of amouthful so let’s break it down into some simple steps. by the way be sure to checkoutthe user friendly perform handbook for a more

detailed explanation.the first thing you need to do to start managing your manual tasks risks is to work out whathigh risk manual tasks you actually have in your workplace.so how do you go about this? you could talk to your workers to find out what tasks theydon’t like doing because they’re difficult or cause them physical pain. if you see taskswhere workers have made improvisations such as standing on boxes and the like to reachthings, this might also indicate that there’s a problem. you should also take a look aroundyour workplace, even video various tasks so you can watch them later and assess whichtasks may be risky. but to do this you’ll need to know what risk factors that you’relooking for in the first place.

there are five risk factors that directlystress the body. these are forceful exertions, awkward and static postures, vibration, repetition,and duration. these are discussed in more detail in the handbook, but just briefly:forceful exertions are about the amount of physical effort needed to do the job. themore effort required to do the task the higher the risk of an injury because the musclesget tired. awkward and static postures is the next riskfactor. awkward postures occur when parts of the body move away from a comfortable neutralposition. for example, the neutral position for the hand and wrist is the handshake positionand the more you bend or twist it, the more awkward or uncomfortable it becomes.static postures refer to postures where a

part of or the whole body is kept in the sameposition for a long period of time. repetition means making the same types ofmovements over and over again. duration relates to the amount of time ittakes to do a task without a break. duration becomes a risk if the task is done for morethan an hour at a time. the last of the five risk factors is vibration,and there are two types. the first is whole body vibration, which normally results fromsitting or standing on a vibrating surface, for example, a forklift, dozer, tractor orplatform. hand-arm vibration is caused by holding on to vibrating equipment such asgrinders, drills or jackhammers. this is particularly risky if the equipment isn’t maintainedproperly.

okay, just to check, can you identify therisk factors in the following scenes? if you’ve identified (a) as being an exampleof repetition, (b) as vibration, (c) as awkward and static postures, (d) as duration, and(e) as forceful exertion. then you’ve got five out of five.now that you know what the five risk factors are, you’ll find it much easier to identifythe tasks in your workplace that have a higher risk of sprain or strain injuries. once you’vespotted the task to improve, the next thing to do is to work your way through the threesteps of the perform risk assessment tool. the first of these steps is to talk to yourworkers to gather the background information that you’ll need to complete worksheetone, which is at the back of the handbook.

the next step is to fill out worksheet two,which you’ll also find at the back of the handbook.the first thing to do here is to work out what parts of the body are affected by thetask that’s being performed. again, you should ask your workers about where they feelsore or tired after performing a task. or you can observe them performing the task tosee if any of the other risk factors we talked about earlier are there. now you need to markthese affected areas on the body map on worksheet two. if you think that several parts of thebody have the same risk, for example the hand and wrist, you can group them together. ifyou’re unsure, just rate each body part separately. if you decide to assess more thanone body part or group, you can mark them

on the body map in different colours to keepbetter track of them. the second part to completing worksheet twois to rate each risk factor. this is done separately for each part of the body thatyou identified on the body map. the rating scale is from one to five and the higher therating the higher the risk. the third and final step at this point isto identify suitable controls for the risks in the tasks that rated the highest. from someone who’s had a lot to do withheavy manual tasks, i guess, it’s certainly easy to use and it’s quick. it really isfast. it allows buy-in from the workers, which is three-quarters of the problem half thetime, if they can see some benefit it certainly

helps you. so let’s put all this into practice. we’regoing to look at an example of unloading a pallet with the help of jane. jane is a safetyofficer at a supermarket. before kicking off the three perform steps,jane firstly pinpointed a problematic task in her workplace – unloading a pallet. shesaw this task as being risky because workers have experienced injuries or pain during orafter unloading activities. jane then followed the first perform step and gathered some backgroundinformation about the task from the workers to help her fill out worksheet one. for thisexample, they received ten pallets a day, three days a week. it takes two to three hoursfor six workers to complete the task.

step two, and jane’s now onto worksheettwo where she needs to identify which parts of the body are affected and how she’llgroup them together. jane has seen the potential trouble spots of the lower back, shoulderand the hand and wrist. the hand and wrist have been grouped together as they have similaritiesin their movements, position and effort. the next thing she does is rate each risk factorfor each body part. exertion has been rated as a four for the shoulder, as there is asubstantial amount of effort needed to move the boxes and the movements are fairly quick.awkward posture has also been rated as a four, as the worker is reaching to one side of thebody when picking up the boxes. there’s no vibration involved in this task so we canrate this risk factor as a one for all body

parts. the task takes two to three hours tocomplete, which fits in the highest category for duration because it’s greater than twohours. this rating is the same for all the body parts. the cycle time, which is the timeit takes to pick up a box, put it on the trolley and go back to get another one is five tosix seconds. so this would fit in the five category for repetition because it’s lessthan ten seconds. the workers and jane have completed the ratings for each of the otherbody parts. now that she’s finished assessing the riskfactors, she determines where the highest risks are. from the form, we can see thatexertion and awkward posture for the shoulder and lower back and duration and repetitionfor all body parts rated in the four or five

categories and need to be controlled verysoon. her final step is to work out what she cando to reduce these risks. the first priority should always be to eliminate the risk altogether.but in this case it isn’t an option. the next best plan is to come up with a designcontrol. by raising the height of the trolley the risk to the back and shoulder can be reduced.repetition and duration also rated highly, so the time that any one worker does the taskneeds to be reduced. now that the controls have been determined, jane will have to makesure that all the workers know how to do the job the right way. this doesn’t mean givingthem lifting technique training, such as teaching them to bend their knees and keep their backstraight, because this type of training alone

doesn’t work in reducing the risk of injury.training needs to be specific to this task. workers need to know how to use the new trolley.for example, how to adjust it, where it’s stored and what maintenance is needed to keepit working the way it’s supposed to. and that’s the perform process. as we’ve seen in this film identifying risksand putting in control measures for manual tasks doesn’t have to be difficult or costly.in most cases simple, inexpensive measures can result in huge improvements to safetyin your workplace. safety is not only good practice, it’s good business. i think using perform has made productivitya whole lot better.

the financial performance of the organisationhas increased five hundred percent since we’ve implemented these programs. there was a set-up cost, you know, differentjigs and all the rest of it and retraining workers, but it is going to pay off. our employees also know that we value them.if we want our employees to show the same level of commitment to the product that wesend out, then we have to show that same level of commitment to them. all i can say to anybody else faced with,you know, the circumstances i had if there’s a better way to do it, do it. don’t putyourself in a situation where you’re going

to suffer the recurring pain that i’ve got. work safe. home safe. for more info or copies of the perform handbook and worksheets please visit www.worksafe,qld.gov.au or call the workplace health and safety infoline on 1300 369 915.

Tweet

Subscribe to receive free email updates: