What is a manual handling injury? Quite often manual handling or manual tasks are the scape goat for most workplace injuries and a major reason some workplaces and organisations continue to fail when it comes to improving safety and minimising risk to staff. Unfortunately the cause of injury is often complex and there can be many contributing factors; fatigue, stress, anxiety, industrial issues, fitness, obesity, smoking and diabetes.
Unfortunately most workplace injury compensation schemes where a worker’s wage is paid and medical expenses covered relies on there being a ’cause’ of injury. For various reasons (simplicity, data entry and maybe a lack of understanding) claim forms, incident forms and accident investigation documentation have very limited scope for pinpointing the ‘actual cause’ instead, merely identifying the ‘listed cause’ that the worker or manager writes down on the form. Further complicating the issue is the bias of these work place injury compensation schemes, whereby a worker may feel some pressure to come up with a plausible cause of injury for fear of not having their claim accepted.
It’s laughable when managers and people involved with the management of injured workers tell you the leading cause of injury is ‘moving boxes’, ‘pushing trolleys’ or ‘unloading pallets of stock’. Really all they are identifying is the leading cause of ‘recorded injury cause’.
So where to from here, if we can’t rely on incident and or hazard forms to identify the ’cause’ of injuries? Well, for a start, it maybe time to stop trying to identify a single cause and start with identifying contributing factors. By not trying to narrow it down so much, workplaces and rehabilitation professionals can start to look at all possible causes and factors, rather than just blaming a single element.
safe manual handling 