Posted By Alec Wood
Hi All

Redundancy has inspired a friend of mine to make the jump to self-employment. His company provides a sub-assembley and small quantity manufacturing service, and thus his operations are highly variable from day to day. The work done by his employees is mostly of a repetitive nature, cellular production methods are employed, but the sub-assembley task in particular carry a high degree of repetition, with many being only a single or two operation process.

His previous experience in our factory has made him acutely aware of the dangers of WRULD and he is keem to minimise the potential for such injuries in his new enterprise. Over a pint the other day, he sought my advise in the area of suitable and sufficient risk assessment and in what provision a SME employing only 18 people would be expected to make to mitigate the effects of reptitive work on his employees. I have agreed to assist him on a "mates rates" basis for a short time, but I must soon move on to pastures new at which point he'll be on his own for the most part.

As a startup enterprise, the guy is doing his best but has limited resources, as is often the case with SME's. He does take OHS very seriously though and is keen to give it the attention and resource it deserves. A full risk assessment process is well under way and most of the key areas requiring attention have been identified.

What would be helpful would be some kind of standard ergonomics checklist he could run through when beginning a new operation to assess its likely impact on the body and highlight possible controls. Expert ergonomic risk assessment of each task is not an option because most projects are very short lived.

If anyone could point me in the direction of some suitable material I would be very grateful.

Alec Wood
Samsung Electronics

Posted By Peter John Campbell Quill
Dear Alec

A useful website may be http://www.hebs.com/safe..._topics.cfm?pageID=6.003 as it is set up specifically for SMEs and does reference other documents.

If he was in Scotland he could access free advice through this service. Unfortunately I have no idea if a similar service exists throughout the UK.

Best regards


Peter