The College acknowledges its duty to make sufficient provision for the management of health and safety in the workplace, including its duty to make suitable provision to control manual handling activities and to reduce the risk of injury from such activities as far as is reasonably practicable. 

Manual handling (lifting, pushing, pulling and carrying loads) is the cause of a large number of injuries. This is usually due to a poor lifting technique when carrying out the manual handling operation. The following guidelines provide general information on the safe manual handling of loads.

Principles of Safe Lifting Practice

Moving and Handling Techniques

Manual Handling Assessment Chart (MAC) Tool

Under the Manual Handling Operations Regulations 1992 (as amended), the College must ensure that any manual handling task that cannot be eliminated and that is likely to be a risk to health and safety is examined and assessed. Such tasks would include moving large pieces of equipment or materials in a workshop. A risk assessment should be conducted in order to assess these risks and to produce control measures to reduce the risk of injury.

The Manual Handling Assessment Chart (MAC) tool was developed by the HSE and can be used to assess common risk factors in lifting, lowering, carrying and team handling operations. The HSE website contains a section on the MAC tool including case studies and worked examples. The MAC tool is designed to help users understand, interpret and categorise the level of risk of the various known risk factors associated with manual handling activities. It incorporates a numerical and a colour coding scoring system to highlight high-risk manual handling activities.

It uses a combination of colour coding 'traffic light' (green/amber/red/purple) approach to highlight the level of risk as well as scoring and considers the following three types of operations: single lift, single carry and team handling.

For each type of assessment there is a guide and a flow chart to help you. The flow chart guides you, step by step, through each element of the operation enabling you to evaluate and grade the level of risk. To enable you to calculate the risk for the load and frequency of the operation, a graph is supplied with the flowchart which indicates the appropriate colour band and numerical value to be entered into the score sheet.

Each of the three types of assessment has a score sheet to be filled in. The score sheet will provide a total score and along with the colour banding, determine which elements of the task require attention (i.e. controls put in place to reduce risk)

An interactive version of the score sheet is available on the HSE website which totals the respective scores from the colour bands.

The MAC tool cannot be used to assess the risks associated with pulling or pushing: the risk assessment checklist should be used to evaluate such tasks.