Manual handling tips for employers

What is manual handling? Images of bad backs and squashed toes spring to mind. Reality is, manual handling is a key part of any biopharmaceutical supply chain.
It is designed to keep workers safe. It protects your product. It helps businesses comply.

Manual handling: definition

The Health and Safety Executive defines manual handling as relating to the movement of items either by lifting, lowering, carrying, pushing or pulling.
Under the Manual Handling Operations Regulations 1992, employees must:

• Avoid hazardous manual handling operations so far as is reasonably practicable, by redesigning the task to avoid moving the load or by automating or mechanising the process
• Make a suitable and sufficient assessment of the risk of injury from any hazardous manual handling operations that cannot be avoided
• Reduce the risk of injury from those operations so far as is reasonably practicable. Where possible, provide mechanical assistance, for example, a sack trolley or hoist. Where this is not reasonably practicable then explore changes to the task, the load and the working environment

The Health and Safety Executive has a range of great free manual handling tools.
Check them out here

Author

Phill Allen

Managing Director

An in and outside the (bioprocess) box thinker, fluid management specialist Phill knows a thing or two about keeping pharma liquid logistics flowing.

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