Better to advise your people to avoid the mouse altogether and use the numerous keyboard shortcuts available. Some mice (often the more expensive ones) are deliberately "handed" and lack appropriate sculpting to enable a swap over. Using the 'wrong' hand for anything is never easy and may make correct intuitive posture more difficult to achieve.

Usually ergonomic mice are handed, personally I would recommend changing to one of these, my personal preference is for the evoluent range, they put the hand in a more natural almost handshake position and ensure there is little twisting of joints. I have no connection with the company, but successfully used them to reduce WRULD symptoms on a number of occassions at a previous employer where mouse work was all day every day. Obviously tehre is a significant cost element as these are not cheap and left handed ones seem to be even more expensive, but in my opinion they work well.

Thanks for these interesting responses. I too like the evoluent mouse and have found it very useful for people complaining about sore wrists. Other people use the ball mouse with great success. I use a 'standard' mouse and find changing hands very quick and easy. Well it did take a while to get used to using the left hand, but now it just feels normal to be ambidextrous with my mouse. (It also means other people don't like using my workstation.) My advice to use both hands is directed at people using a standard mouse, who are not suffering at all and get on perfectly well. It's just a way of reducing the likelihood of a problem occurring. I can't understand why this should be advised against, where's the harm in reducing the load on one side. Thanks again

For the benefit of any other under-educated forum users like me, please can anyone advise if 'evoluent' is an adjective or a trade name with regard to computer mice? To avoid being advised to look on the internet I'd better add that I've done that but couldn't readily find the answer - which might simply reflect ineptitude by me when delving the internet!

Regarding 'where's the harm', I'd say in people adopting contorted postures when using the mouse 'wrong'-handed, partly due to familiarity and comfort in the actual holding the mouse, and partly because of the need to lay out the desk differently to get the mouse over to the other side. It seems like advising people to swap the hand they use to write with to me. That would reduce load on one side. I expect it's easy enough when you've practised it enough too - but I wouldn't regard it as worth doing (except, perhaps, for a party trick).

Some of the staff here use penguins but frankly I think this is cruel.

How much !!!!!!

Having looked at the website quoted by AndyMak I would contend that the 'penguins' bear little resemblance to penguins - they're surely more like dolphins - saw a whole school of real ones swimming and leaping south in the Sound of Sleat near Mallaig last Friday. 'Magic' as some folk might say!