Posted By Elizabeth Hallows I work as a manual handling advisor in social services, specifically looking at the handling of people. We contract out some of our home care services to external agencies. I am concerned that our contracts with these agencies should specify requirements to do with their arrangements for manual handling [such as carrying out risk assessments,identifying a competent person, training workers etc], but currently they do not. Does anyone have any advice for me on what these contracts should require? Is anyone aware of a court case which has involved a local authority in these circumstances? Thank you, Elizabeth

Posted By Robert M Edwards Hello Elizabeth, If you would email me I have a copy of some terms which I can send. The idea of subcontracting legally is that you ensure your contractors are complying fully with your legal requirements. Whilst you cannot pass on the total duty you have you can mitigate the risk by employing correct risk procedures and also tying the requirements into the terms of the contract.

Posted By Eric Burt Elizabeth It is important that you ensure that the manual handling of clients is done in a consistent way and this will probably mean that you will have to get together with all the agencies involved in the care of the client to make sure you are all singing from the same hymn sheet. Social Services / contractors / the Health Trust / home carers etc should use the same handling techniques for the client, especially if hoists etc are being used. You might want to consider a working group of all the parties involved, meeting say once a year. Regards, Eric

Posted By Elizabeth Hallows Thank you to all who've replied. I've emailed directly when further information has been offered. In response to John, it appears from discussions with the contracting teams that assessing the potential contractors standards in relation to manual handling hardly happens. One contract stated only that carers should "have training/experience in manual handling". My biggest concern is that we don't require there to be a competent person to do the manual handling risk assessments, but trained staff would be good too! As for monitoring, a health and safety advisor has said that under a different contracts manager, he visited each provider to audit health and safety paperwork, and spoke with direct care staff too, but this has not happened for a couple of years, since a management change. The contracts person I asked said that monitoring took place by the monitoring and reviewing officer visiting the service users home after six weeks of the service starting. My concerns would be that this may be monitoring the satisfaction of the service user, but isn't checking manual handling arrangements at organisational level. Direct email to me as a result of the thread has identified some examples of good practice, where, as Eric says above, joint working groups have got together to identify standards. In addition, the National Care Standards Commission's minimum standards for domi agencies is also helpful. Elizabeth