This leaflet describes what  an employer may need to do to protect his employees from the risk of injury through manual handling tasks in the workplace. It will also be useful to employees and their representatives, because the leaflet also gives examples on how to correctly handle loads. 

The Manual Handling Assessment Charts (MAC) is a tool aimed at employers, health and safety managers and safety representatives and is used by health and safety inspectors. The tool will help you assess the most common risk factors in lifting (and lowering), carrying and team handling operations and was developed to identify high-risk manual handling. It will point you towards the factors you need to modify to control these risks.

This tool will help you identify high-risk pushing and pulling operations and check the effectiveness of any risk-reduction measures.

There are two types of pulling and pushing operations you can assess using this tool: moving loads on wheeled equipment, such as hand trolleys, pump trucks, carts or wheelbarrows;

moving loads without wheels, which might involve actions such as dragging/sliding, churning (pivoting and rolling) and rolling.

This guidance is mainly for employers, managers and safety representatives, but may also be useful for employees.  The guidance explains how to avoid, assess and reduce the risk of injury from manual handling. 

This manual is intended to help the reader on how to use a risk assessment form. It consists of two fully worked examples for both lifting and carrying as well as pushing and pulling. With these worked out forms and empty forms, the reader should be able to carry out a risk assessment with these examples.

This website provides some basic information on ergonomics and its implications. It also provides some useful links that give more in-depth information on topics as strain injuries and lifting technique.

This website gives advice on how to organize your office space and provides a movie on how to adjust your office work place.

This website provides information on unfortunate work positions; its nature, its risks and some tips on variation. It also provides a risk assessment method for unfortunate work positions.

This website provides information on monotonous work; its nature, its risks and some tips on variation. It also provides a risk assessment method for monotonous work.

This website provides assessment models for the assessment of health risk in heavy work. The models are based on common work tasks.