Abstract
The objective of this study is to propose an implementation guideline for industry in the prevention of ergonomic-related musculoskeletal disorders. In developed countries, ergonomic-related musculoskeletal disorders significantly impact the labor, the industry, as well as the society. To lower such an impact, most countries put much effort in implementing all sorts of measures for the prevention of ergonomic-related musculoskeletal disorders, and so does Taiwan. In 2013, the Occupational Safety and Health Act was revised by adding a clause ‘the employer is required to carefully plan and to take necessary safety and health measures to prevent musculoskeletal disorders due to repetitive strain injury’. To assist the employer to take practical measures in confirming the law, an easy-to-follow implementation guideline should be devised. To devise such an easy-to-follow implementation guideline, the measures commonly used in developed countries and the intervention techniques developed in Taiwan are integrated. The common measures are process flow, ergonomic assessment checklists, and easy-to-follow checklist. The process flow basically consist of the following steps, such as: analyzing the workplace, identifying risk factors, ergonomics job hazard analysis, controlling risk factors, implementing controls, and etc... Ergonomic assessment checklists may be KIM, RULA, OCRA, HAL-TLV, and the like. The intervention techniques is characterized as 4 steps: “work observation,” “risk assessment,” “design improvement”; and “pre-evaluation”. The aforementioned contents were integrated into a prevention guideline, which consists of 4 steps: (1) investigation of musculoskeletal disorders, (2) simple intervention, (3) advance intervention, and (4) control and follow-up. The first step is to identify the workers of high risk for ergonomic intervention. The second step is to intervene a large portion (e.g. 70 %) of common, simple and typical ergonomic hazards. Advance intervention is to be carried out by HSE personal with ergonomic training to perform complete intervention. Control and follow-up is to control the health of the workers and follow up those which have been intervened. In addition, among this guideline, the most critical element is the ease-to-follow checklist used in simple intervention. The checklist is drawn with 40 simple, self-explanatory illustrations of works and workplaces, with a risky scenario on the left, and an improved scenario on the right. By checking into the checklist, the worker is able to identify risk factor, and adopt the improved suggestion. Nevertheless, it is found the checklist is only fit 52 % of workplace scenarios. Therefore in order to raise its coverage more than 70%, the checklist is extended to 60 scenarios using previous data. After extended, it is able to fit 84% of workplace scenarios. The checklist will be a power tool for the intervention of a large portion of workplaces with WMSD hazards.Keywords： Ergonomics-related musculoskeletal disorder, Musculoskeletal disorder prevention technique, Musculoskeletal disorder prevention procedure