Documents Hignett, Sue 3 results

"This paper gives an overview of the theory of participatory ergonomics interventions and summary examples from a range of industries, including health care, military, manufacturing, production and processing, services, construction and transport. The definition of participatory approaches includes interventions at macro (organizational, systems) levels as well as micro (individual), where workers are given the opportunity and power to use their knowledge to address ergonomic problems relating to their own working activities. Examples are given where a cost-effective benefit has been measured using musculoskeletal sickness absence and compensation costs. Other examples, using different outcome measures, also showed improvements, for example, an increase in productivity, improved communication between staff and management, reduction in risk factors, the development of new processes and new designs for work environments and activities. Three cases are described from Canada and Japan where the participatory project was led by occupational health teams, suggesting that occupational health practitioners can have an important role to play in participatory ergonomics projects. "(Authors' abstract)

This technical note details the preliminary stage in the development of a postural analysis tool, "Rapid Entire Body Assessment" (REBA). REBA has been developedto fill a perceived need for a practioner's field tool, specifically designed to be sensitive to the type of unpredictable working postures found in health care and other service industries. A team of ergonomists, physiotherapists and nurses collected and individually coded over 600 postural examples to produce a new tool incorporating dynamic and static postural loading factors, human-load interface, and a new concept of a gravity-assisted upper limb position. Initial reliability for inter-observer coding shows promise but further work is needed to establish the validity of the tool.

"In 1990 the European Union (EU) introduced a directive to protect workers against the risks involved in handling heavy loads. This paper reports on a benchmarking exercise to (a) investigate the implementation of the EU Directive on Manual Handling in the healthcare and social care industries and (b) gather expert opinions on the residual problems for patient handling in nine countries in the EU. Baseline data were collected about healthcare and social care systems, funding, implementation of the EU Manual Handling Directive and official patient handling guidance from government and professional organisations. It was found that the directive was implemented between 1992 and 1996 but relatively little research has been carried out to evaluate its impact in the healthcare industry. Only three countries had official national guidance on patient handling and there was little supporting research evidence for many of the recommendations. Expert opinions were provided to identify residual patient handling issues and barriers to safer patient handling in each country. These data have provided participating countries with an opportunity to both identify gaps, and work with other EU countries to address common problems."