I think this question has either scared other practitioners into submission or bored them into submission. I can't quite decide which. Maybe both.

B

Interested thread. Many thanks for bringing it to my attention.

Now I am having to follow by IOSH on Linkedin and the Forum here!

Added my bit to it in a hope of discourse. We will see.

B

KieranD, you are right that the lack of specification makes the provision of an answer difficult. For that I do apologize.

What I was trying to elude is the experience practitioners may have with ergonomic assessments which do not following the traditional and constrained premise of what ergonomic can be assumed to me.

However, that is by no means an inference that you are practicing under such conditions which the nature of your query make clear.

The International Ergonomics Association (IEA) definition of ergonomics or human factors is as follows:

Ergonomics (or human factors) is the scientific discipline concerned with the understanding of interactions among humans and other elements of a system, and the profession that applies theory, principles, data and methods to design in order to optimize human well-being and overall system performance.
(Source: http://iea.cc/01_what/What%20is%20Ergonomics.html)

And within the IEA there are 26 Technical Committees, operating in 2012, which I have listed in Table 01, then putting aside the more traditional view of ergonomics and embracing it’s full definition, what:

(1) Are the experience practitioners have had of these?

(2) The methodologies practitioners are using?

(3) How practitioners = define the required competencies?

Whilst I appreciate these questions could be construed as being quite big to answer, and the limits we all have to time, what I am looking to simulate is some discussion on the subject of ergonomics which other practitioners could dip into, so vignettes would be fine.

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Table 01 - Showing the 26 IEA Technical Committees

1. Activity Theories for Work Analysis and Design
2. Aerospace HFE
3. Affective Product Design
4. Aging
5. Agriculture
6. Anthropometry
7. Auditory Ergonomics
8. Building and Construction
9. Ergonomics for Children and Educational Environments
10. Ergonomics in Design
11. Ergonomics in Manufacturing
12. Gender and Work
13. Healthcare Ergonomics
14. Human Factors and Sustainable Development
15. Human Simulation and Virtual Environments
16. Mining
17. Musculoskeletal Disorders
18. Online Communities
19. Organizational Design and Management
20. Process Control
21. Psychophysiology in Ergonomics
22. Safety & Health
23. Slips, Trips and Falls
24. Transport
25. Visual Ergonomics
26. Work With Computing Systems

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quote=Brian Hagyard]Andrew

have you looked at the HSE ART tool as a potential starting point?

http://www.hse.gov.uk/msd/uld/art/index.htm

Andrew

To me, you're setting up a problem of a research kind that I'd avoid in the 'real world' (unless there was an extremely attractive financial incentive perhaps), as it's not clear who's likely to benefit from a solution.

By contrast with the IEA, clients who've paid me for a report expect to have simple practical indications of what their staff and managers can do to resolve a problem, knowing that even then they may continue to avoid solving it. Perhaps irrational but ergonomists, like others who intervene in lives of clients, may have to live with irrational responses to their work.

'Melrose80086' refers to one set of approaches to end user requests. In addition to legal cases and repetive-action tasks in manufacturing, I can cite:
> applications of soft systems methodology as response to recurrent conflict between senior managers of an Occupational Health Unit serving a population of 10,000, which contributed to a literally overnight solution to a problem that had dogged the unit for over 40 months
> application of a variety of techniques to manage safety of participants in an annual town procession and carnival, at 46-hours notice, with the event under threat of cancellation unless a safety plan was produced with 27 hours
> application of observational and measurement techniques to prepare a proposal for imposed lighting on the cul-de-sac up to a girls secondary school for its negotiations with the CEO of their borough.

What 'Melrose 800860 refers to as the Ergonomics & Human Factors Society is now the Institute of E & HF; the URL of their website is www.iehf.org.uk, which may offer you some further leads for your enquiries. Otherwise, or additionally, you may find it useful to compare how ergonomic risk assessment processes are taught on a M Sc in an American, a British and an Australian university and how they are described in newsletters of the professional societies of E & H F practitioners in these different countries.

Andrew

With reference to your observations #1 and #6, perhaps a significant issue for you to address is the possibility that the ergonomics profession, through IEA and statements of leaders - such as the article in the April 2012 issue of Ergnomics - may be misleading in claiming proficiency in applying 'psychology'.

For generally when ergonomists do apply psychology, they limit what they do to circumscribed tools from 'cognitive' psychology that don't address many issues at work that require applications of 'social' psychology.

A fairly sad example arose in a recent issue of the online magazine 'Ergoweb Report', in which the ergonomist Peter Budwick used the term 'infamous' without qualification or justification in relation to the classic Hawthorne experiments. To anyone seriously familar with the methodology of these interventions. all he illustrated was the depth of his ignorance of what social psychology entails. A comparable faux pas, was evident in a letter in the November 2012 issue of The Psychologist by Jon Berman, current President of hte IEHF.

While few professional ergonomists are as brash and unapologetic in their misjudgments, sadly such unfortunate boo-boos tend to cloud the potential value of ergonomic interventions and risk generating avoidable hassle.