Abstract
Work-related musculoskeletal disorder (WMSD) is a common occupational disease in industrialized countries, it affects the worker’s health, decreases productivity, and increases significant social cost. In order to prevent WMSDs, almost all countries have established many WMSD prevention procedures are established by health and ergonomics bodies aiming at worksite improvement based on ergonomics principle to be used on WMSDs prevention practice in the field. This thesis compared the pros and cons of the prevention procedures in literatures, like governmental publication, and internet web pages of the US, UK, Australia, and Taiwan, and in a hope to come up with good recommendation for Taiwan. The prevention procedures from these countries basically consists of 4 steps: from worksite observation in assessing WMSD incidence, diagnosing risk factors based on information gathered in observation, proposing improvement design against identified risk factors, and a follow-up procedure for post-improvement evaluation. The result shows that the U.S. procedure is good at its ergonomics awareness checklist which is able to determine improvement priority quickly; the UK is good at its ‘work filter’ which can screen out unfavorable force, posture, and repetition for lifting operation quickly and efficiently; the Australia are good at its two-step screening mechanisms, initial screening and risk factor confirmation, and logical improvement alternatives generation. The common drawback of these three countries: the worksite observation does not guide the observers to record complete and sufficient information, such as facility layout, work pieces and tools, and the worker’s characteristics, operation and task description, and so forth. They demand significant ergonomics knowledge to identify risk factors, and therefore not suitable for field health and safety engineers (HSE). In worksite improvement, the US strongly requires experienced engineer expertise; the UK is a better off by providing simple rules of thumb toward specific risk factor individually, but there is no systematic approach, in other words, improvement alternatives cannot be generated logically. Although, the design alternatives of Australia are presented in logical manner, they are not presented visually. The procedure of Taiwan has a better improvement procedure, it consists of a pick-and-choose flow chart and 3 SOP worksheets which assists the practitioner in recoding complete worksite information in an easy fashion, identified risk factors with certain, proposing all possible improvement alternatives logically, and finally evaluates the effectiveness of improvement efficiently. In all, Taiwan has a slightly better improvement procedure, it is more logical and demands less ergonomic expertise, and therefore, only with a brief training, HSE personnel can do it DIY. Nevertheless, to make it more user-friendly for HSE personnel in the field, it is suggested that a ‘work filter’ of the UK and the two-step checklists of Australia are fused into the Taiwan procedure. Keywords：Work injury, WMSD, CTD, Musculoskeletal disorder, prevention technique, Musculoskeletal disorder Improvement Procedure, Ergonomic technique