Every company incorporates manual handling into the daily activities, which might be anything from furniture moving to loading and unloading commercial vehicles, and many people are simply unaware of safe manual handling techniques and consequently suffer back and neck injuries as a result of poor handling strategies. This can not only cost the company a lot of time lost with employees taking time off for such injuries to heal, compensation often has to be paid to injured workers, and if you enlist the help of the experts, they can design and deliver the perfect manual handling training course to minimise the risks of personal injury caused by manual handling.
Qualified Manual Handling Training Specialists
If your business is based in Australia, there are manual handling risk assessments by Corporate Work Health, a pioneering firm that is dedicated to improving manual handling techniques for all employees across a wide range of industries. In order to help you gain a deeper understanding of such training, here is a breakdown of the step by step process that takes place when a company decides to train their key staff is safe manual handling techniques.
Step 1: After an initial phone conversation, the specialists would make an appointment to come to your place of work and carry out a series of observations, when they would take stills and video footage of manual handling in practice, which they will use to compile the course content. There are no off-the-shelf solutions for such a training course, as every organisation is unique.
Step 2: The experts then take this data away and compile what they feel is a suitable course that will best benefit your workforce and then set a schedule for the training sessions, which would be held at your place of work.
Step 3: The training would commence, with sessions of between 2.5 and 3 hours in duration, with as many as 15 of your key personnel involved, and these sessions would be guided by the experts, who would also introduce risk assessment and how to apply any control systems that might need to be in place.
Step 4: Guided practice using all the new techniques learned during the training sessions, which reinforces the new knowledge.
The Manual Handling Trainers
The team would consist of qualified health professionals such as osteopaths, physiotherapists, exercise physiologists and occupational therapists, all of whom are more than qualified to deliver the course content.
Course Objectives
The manual handling training course would have the following goals:
- Define manual handling and the need for training.
- Open discussion on what the course should contain.
- Explain in detail, the human anatomy and how manual handling injuries occur.
- Define cumulative strain and how it can affect a person.
- Define manual handling risk factors and hoe to assess any risks that may be present.
- Educate workers on incorrect manual handling techniques, while introducing safer techniques.
If you would like to learn more about manual handling training, search online for a local manual handling training company and they can offer you a free assessment to determine what training, if any, your workforce needs.