The "Relax the loads" week begins!!

We begin today the European Week European Safety and Health at Work, which is celebrated in week 43 every year, a week in which we will dedicate ourselves to presenting good practices to avoid musculoskeletal disorders and thus contribute to the campaign whose title is:

Healthy Jobs,

Let's relax the loads

belonging to the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work, EU-OSHA.

In general, the measures that we can implement to tackle MSDs are of the following types:

In addition, it will be essential to do a detailed study of the tasks to be performed as well as the personnel who will perform them. In many cases, the measures that we can implement entail a low cost, with a very high return, since we will be avoiding sick leave and what is better, we will be taking care of our workers, who we already know we must put at the center if we want to be successful, as Vision Zero, campaign of the International Social Security Association, tells us. (AISS) in favor of zero damage.

In this case, we bring an example belonging to our guide of good practices for the prevention of musculoskeletal disorders, prepared in collaboration with Prevencontrol:

Good practices for the cleaning sector:

One of the activities most likely to suffer MSDs are those carried out by housekeepers, injuries that are aggravated due to such high work rates.Let's see what these activities are and the types of repetitive movements that are done:

These repetitive movements will lead to injuries but we give you here some ideas to implement that will avoid these musculoskeletal disorders and the damage they generate:

• Carry out the work in pairs, in this way ergonomic and psychosocial conditions are improved (isolation, feedback, etc. are avoided).
• Redistribute the work, for example, having the room boy, who is in charge of distributing the material, help with tasks that require more effort such as turning the mattress, or moving the bags of dirty clothes, etc. 
• Instruct in procedures for making beds, for example with the tweezers method.
• Analyze the times it takes to make a room, travel and breaks to establish a work system by weights or points, establishing a maximum work load.
• Instead of using mops, which involve a rotating movement of the wrists, implement a working method with wet mops.
• Preventive and adequate maintenance of the carts, thus avoiding overexertion when pushing them.
• Use of auxiliary means for access to high areas, such as small lifts.
• Use of easy-wring or ergonomic buckets for the mop.
• Replacement of mops with telescopic sticks that allow movements in more ergonomic positions.
• Use of intelligent motorized carts, which notify us where the worker is in case of emergency, notify when to take breaks, facilitate the movement of the cart, notify us of the lack of some material, among other advantages.

To finish, reader, since you have been sitting for a while, we propose a microexercise, this way we demonstrate that movement is demonstrated by walking:

At Fraternidad-Muprespa we hope that these guides are of interest to our mutual members, meet their expectations by predominating practical cases and help to strengthen the necessary preventive knowledge, as well as the implementation of preventive measures that can be effectively transferred to the workplace, thus guaranteeing the safety, health and well-being of the employees. workers.