Journal of Health and Safety at Work

Introduction: Manual material handling (MMH) is the most common cause of work-related Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSDs). Prevention of MSDs is highly critical. The aim of this study was to assess risk of carpets manual handling by retail workers, and to implement ergonomic interventions in order to reduce risk of MSDs.

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Material and Method: This interventional study was conducted among 36 workers in 19 retailer sites of a textile corporation. Ergonomics assessment of the retailers was done using the comprehensive risk assessment model of the British Carpet Foundation. Moreover, the Nordic Musculoskeletal Questionnaire was used to determine the prevalence of workers’ MSDs. Reassessment was conducted after implementation of the ergonomics interventions.

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Result: The mean age and work tenure of participants were 36.28 and 16.2 years, respectively. The results of Nordic Questionnaire before intervention showed that overall 37.8% of the workers had experienced pain at least once during the past year, with the highest frequency belonged to the lower back (75%), shoulder (61%), and neck and upper back (55%), respectively. After implementing the interventions, the prevalence of MSDs reduced to 23.5%. The results of risk assessment before and after the interventions showed that of the 19 retailer sites, six sites were improved from poor to average state, and one site showed improvement from average to good condition.

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Conclusion: By implementing ergonomics interventions in carpet delivery sites, the risk factors of MSDs, induced by manual carpet handling, were reduced and safety and ergonomic conditions of the retailers were improved, compared to the previous conditions.

Introduction: Choosing maintenance strategy is one of the most complex and essential processes that can affect the safety and cost of equipment. The main aim of this study was to determine a risk-based maintenance policy for improvement of the safety and maintenance indices.

Material and Method: According to literature reviews and constraints associated with the studied industry, a number of safety and maintenance indices were selected and their values were measured. Next, in order to promote the selected indices, the best policy was implemented on nine critical machines of the company based on criteria such as cost, risk and availability in the framework of the fuzzy network analysis process. Finally, after six months period, the indices were re-measured. The Wilcoxon test was used to assess the changes in the indices.

Result: In the implementation of the model, condition based maintenance was more effective than other strategies. Following the intervention, the improvement of safety and maintenance indices was statistically significant. The statistical analyses demonstrated that indices like reliability, availability, mean time between failures, and the number of dangerous failures all were improved significantly (P<0.05).

Conclusion: The results showed that the simultaneous use of three criteria, i.e. cost, risk and availability in maintenance planning could reduce equipment-related accidents. Finally, the recommended model can improve the efficiency and competitiveness of organizations by increasing availability and reducing equipment costs