Manual Tasks & Queensland Vegetable Packing Industry
The Queensland Government, Department of Employment & Industrial Relations, has established a Musculoskeletal Injury Taskforce (MIT) to tackle the problem of increasing work related musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) in industry. Ergonomists have been allocated to strategic industry groups to manage specific MSD projects. One such project involves the horticultural industrys vegetable packing sheds. Here vegetables are cleaned, sorted, graded and packed in containers that are distributed to the major supermarket chains, ready for sale. The process is very labour intensive and involves a range of high risk manual tasks. Workers are predominantly women from the local community or itinerant, ‘back-packer, tourist labour. There is a high incidence of MSDs within this labour pool. Manual tasks assessments were conducted in key vegetable growing sub-sectors which included celery, crucifers, lettuce, sweet corn and tomatoes. Findings included the identification of high risk manual tasks associated with palletising and retrieving produce from bins. Another important finding was the lack of knowledge within the sector of manual tasks risk factors and the subsequent lack of skills in relation to manual tasks risk assessments. One early outcome of this project is the development of a participative ergonomics program to assist in assessing the degree of risk associated with various tasks. This PErforM (Participative Ergonomics for Manual tasks) program is based on a similar, successful program developed for the mining and civil construction industries. The design is a train-the-trainer program to involve key players using a simplified risk assessment tool to identify the risk associated with high risk tasks and subsequent controls. The key players are the people who are actually doing the work. Team members identify hazards in their work and these hazards are facilitated through a risk assessment process which requires them to develop suitable controls. The work teams plan the implementation of key controls and are shown how to evaluate those controls. This program will be rolled out to specific industry groups. These groups will be identified by the horticultural?? industrys peak grower association and delivered by MIT Ergonomists. Evaluation tools have been built into the program to monitor its success. The Vegetable Packing project is due to run over a 3 year period from financial years 2007/2008 to 2009/2010.
Bernard Ziebarth
Musculo-Skeletal Injury Task Force, Workplace Health & Safety Queensland, PO Box 234 Toowoomba Q 4350, Australia
国际会议
17th World Congress on Ergonomics(第十七届国际人类工效学大会)
北京
英文
1-5
2009-08-09（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）