We all know it: Manual lifting strains the back, shoulders, and legs. And improper lifting causes injuries that can be serious and lasting.
But how can you tell if a lift is safe or unsafe? Is it OK for a technician to hoist a drain machine out of and back into a truck at job sites? Or should you really outfit the truck with a ramp or some type of hoist?
Well, you don’t have to guess. There’s a way to determine, mathematically, whether a given lift is likely to cause harm. It’s called the NIOSH Lifting Equation. You can find information about it in various places on the Internet, and one Web site, http://www.emcins.com/losscontrol/quick_links/employee_safety_health/ergonomicsNIOSH.aspx, actually has an online calculator that uses the equation as its basis.
Why it matters
Safe lifting is important because injuries caused by manual lifting are a leading health and safety concern nationwide.
The National Safety Council says overexertion injuries to the back, shoulders, and knees account for more than three in 10 injuries on the job. NIOSH (the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health) created the lifting equation to help employers determine the reasonable certainty of the safety of lifting tasks and to set reasonable limits for how much employees should lift. The equation is one of various tools that can be used in a complete injury prevention program.
NIOSH created its first guidelines for manual lifting in 1981 and released the first version of the lifting equation in 1991. It has been updated since then. In essence, the equation is used to calculate a Recommended Weight Limit for a given task, based on a variety of factors:
• How far out from the body the object is at the beginning and end of the lift.
• How high the object is from the ground at the beginning and end of the lift.
• The vertical distance the object is lifted.
• How far the body has to twist at the beginning of the lift and at the end.
• How many such lifts are performed per minute, over how long a time.
• The amount of force required to grip the object.
• The weight of the object.
Checking it out
With the online calculator, you can quickly enter data that approximates lifting conditions to which your people are exposed. The result will tell you whether the lift appears to be safe, or whether you should study the lifting procedure and consider making changes.
Of course, just casually using this calculator is not an appropriate way to gauge the safety of lifts your people perform. For that, you may need to rely on an expert. But the equation and the calculator may help you “red flag” lifting procedures that may be putting your people at more risk than you imagine.
If your people do a fair amount of lifting, then it might be worth your spending some time observing lifting tasks in the field, and taking a few minutes to use the calculator. You can learn more about the NIOSH Lifting Equation at http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/94-110/.
