Ensuring our practical skills are reducing the risk
Dimity Wadsworth 1 Rosi Gates 1
- SA Health, Adelaide, SA, Australia
One of the challenges of practicalskills based manual handling training is to ensure the practical methods taught fit within a risk management framework and are compatible with and complementary to the new WHS Legislation and Hazardous Manual Tasks Code of Practice. Although eliminating hazards is our ultimate aim, minimising risk is the more common outcome and may still involve the workers physical interaction with their environment. We saw a need to assist workers and trainers to make a link between their chosen control measure, the principles of safe manual handling and the minimisation of any hazardous characteristics.
As such we have developed simple training tools and activities that can be used both during the problem solving or application to work task component of training or within the work place itself. These provide a simple format to identify the hazardous characteristics of a manual task and guide the choice and review of suitable control measures from the skills and principles covered during training.