Manual Handling: Different Courses For Different Jobs

What do health care professionals, dockworkers, construction workers and office workers all have in common? Most are required to do at least some heavy and awkward lifting. Therefore, it is important to know how to lift and move heavy or awkward objects without causing injury to oneself.

Of course, lifting a patient and moving them from a bed to a chair isn’t the same as lifting and carrying a half dozen 8 by ten boards and that is why there are different manual handling courses for different types of jobs. While the basics of manual handling remain virtually the same, you don’t lift things all in the same manner and the different types of risks can’t be minimized in the same way.

While a winch may make lifting that heavy load easier in a warehouse or on a construction site, it isn’t going to do the job in an office nor a home for the elderly. So courses need to be designed to address the special issues and problems in the different fields.

Manual Handling Tips For Employees

While many people think that manual handling courses are designed to help ensure that employers are in compliance with their need to evaluate the risk of manual handling to their employees and minimize the risk as much as possible, these courses are also geared towards giving employees tips in lifting and other techniques that will help them to minimize their own risk as well.

Safety in the workplace is a joint effort and manual handling classes are geared just towards helping the employer and the employee jointly understand how to recognize, report, evaluate and minimize the risk creating a safer work environment for all concerned.

That is why manual handling classes go beyond the mere basics and actually design classes to help employers and employees in individual fields deal with those issues that are relevant to them. After all dealing with patients is far different than dealing with a box of printer paper and the ways of lifting them are different as well.

In fact, in the health care profession, the risk of injury is not just to the employee but the patient as well and this issue is unique to that field and an important issue to be addressed. However, learning the proper way to move a patient isn’t going to be of much interest or use to that warehouse worker who spends his day loading and unloading crates nor to that construction worker who needs to get those roofing tiles raised to a roof.

By designing specific manual handling courses for specific trades it is possible to cover more issues that are pertinent to the individual business rather than simply give generalized information that may be of little benefit to anyone. By individualizing each manual handling course, you are increasing safety for each profession.

So if you need to take a manual handling course look for one that is specifically designed for your field. Not only will you get the most for your money that way but you will also have more information in which to help create a better and safer work environment.

 

 

Make an Enquiry:

Google Rating
4.5
Total Rating 4.5 out of 5 based on 697 reviews
×