The importance of training in ergonomics at all company levels. The case of CEE Dr. Schneider
Contrary to what is normally thought, the safety and health of workers do not only involve experts in occupational risk management, but also all the company levels. The project performed by the company Dr. Schneider made it possible both to train risk management professionals in the assessment of ergonomic risks and to identify the actions to be taken to reduce such risks; additionally, the project also made the engineering department aware of the importance of an adequate design of the workstation (both from the dimensional and the organizational perspective) in order to reduce the risk of musculoskeletal disorders.
Why should companies implement actions to promote health among workers?
It has been shown that promoting health at work means fewer accidents and diseases, especially the chronic ones, which reduces the costs they involve. That is why an increasing number of companies are implementing actions to promote healthy living habits among workers. However, it is essential to consider that such actions must be selected according to an initial diagnosis of the well-being of the workers, and that a regular follow-up should be performed to know whether the action was adequately designed to achieve the objective set. In any case, the economic and material resources of the company must always be taken into account.
MANMADE. Designing jobs that are tailored to people
Workers must be conceived as the essential element in the factory environment. From this perspective, both the job and the production planning must be adapted to the skills, knowledge and characteristics of each worker so as to maximize the knowledge and potential of workers in all age groups and in different functions, which simultaneously promotes greater safety in their workstations. On that basis, the “MANufacturing through ergonoMic and Safe Antrophocentric aDaptive workplaces for context aware factories in EUROPE. MANMADE” project encourages the implementation of new models of jobs that are suitable for workers in terms of accessibility, inclusiveness, efficiency and job satisfaction. This approach enhances worker performance and, consequently, increases enterprise competitiveness.
How to make it easy to evaluate the manual material handling
The manual material handling is considered one of the main risk factors in the appearance of back injury.To perform the analysis of the level of risk, different more or less complex procedures are applied according to the type of task.
The main objective of this article is to provide information that will allow prevention technicians to choose the appropriate procedure for the assessment of ergonomic risks inherent in the manual material handling, one that will enable a more agile analysis without sacrificing reliability in the results.
In order to achieve this goal, we formulated ten case studies in which we varied both the handling conditions and their level of complexity. For each one of them we made a comparison between the result of applying the recommended procedure from the technical point of view and the simplified procedure. Thereafter, prevention technicians and experts in ergonomics assessed their usefulness. We chose the application Ergo/IBV as our computer tool.
The simplification proposals were found to be very useful in cases 6 (palletizing up to 8 layers), 7 (variability in weight) and 10 (different tasks that the same worker performs during the course of the day) and quite useful in case number 8 (important variability in terms of weight and frequency).
BUSCAR / FIND
SOCIAL MEDIA
