Have you become a victim to an injury at work having not received any manual handling training from your employer? Perhaps you have received training but the training was not adequate or sufficient for the task in hand? Or maybe you have lifted a box which was too heavy and caused you to suffer from back pain?
Manual handling injuries can come from simple everyday tasks such as lifting, carrying, pushing and pulling. When lifting a load it is important to follow manual handling procedures, which is generally to bend your knees, keeping them at shoulder distance apart, keeping you’re back straight and holding the load close to your chest and not at arm’s length apart.
The Law
Manual handling is governed by the Manual Handling Operations Regulations 1992. Under the regulations, employers owe a duty of care to employees to provide you with manual handling training. Failure to do so could result in liability for a claim. Under Section 4(1) a of the act an employer must not ask an employee to carry out duties which carry a risk of injury if it is “reasonably practicable” to avoid. An example of this would be when an employer asks you to lift something when the task you have been asked to carry out could be done without the load being lifted.
If it is not reasonably practicable to avoid ad lift then the employer must “take appropriate steps to reduce the risk of injury to those employees“. For example if an employer asks you to carry a heavy load by yourself when it would take 2-3 people to lift such load then this would be deemed unreasonable. Your employer may even provide you with equipment to lift an item instead of you lifting it manually. It is important the employer takes all factors into consideration when asking you to carry out a task.
If an employer has carried out manual handling training with you but you then proceed to pick up an item or carry out a task in a different manner to the one which you have been shown then your employer may not be liable. An employer cannot be held liable for your actions if you choose not to follow the correct procedure which has been shown to you.
“Fitting the job to the person rather than the person to the job”
This is because every individual has different characteristics – for example height and build. A task which one person is able to carry out may not be suitable for another. One person’s tolerance may be another person’s loss. Your employer should keep training logs of the type of training they have carried out when such training was carried out and who it was carried out by. You should be provided with regular update training due to the nature of the modern day world in which we live.
