Provision Training & Testing Asessment Summary

The DSE Regulations are in force and are mandatory.
To comply the following needs to take place...

• Provide to each user: (Items 1-5 within DSEasy®)
• Health and safety training including Advice of risk at the workstation
• Information as to what you are doing about the Regulations
• Eye sight test on request
• Breaks and changes of activity.
• Ensure workstations meet minimum requirements.
• A workstation assessment

Importantly, a way of proving the effectiveness of the training should be undertaken.

Please refer to Mrs. Clarke and The Metropolitan Police, where management showed a video but Mrs. Clarke kept working in a wrong way. The Court held that Management had not proved the effectiveness of the Training and were therefore liable. It was not Mrs. Clarke’s fault that she did not heed the information given.

A Test is a good way to ascertain and prove that the Information has been understood. Where information has not been understood, the Information needs to be presented again and understood.

Manually this is time consuming.

• 1 day to set the Test
• Cost of printing and distribution
• Follow up of those who have not understood 15 minutes each*
• Marking, 5 minutes each
• Recording who has done what, when, 5 minutes each
• Completing the Test Paper say 10 minutes each user

*av. 50% have misunderstood or not understood all information

You have a choice of how to meet this requirement. Most are labour and therefore cost intensive. These are all under the banner of Information that needs to be given. Therefore you could deliver all this Information:

• Face to face with each individual user. Average time taken with each user 30 minutes. Overall time 60 minutes
• (30 for the deliverer as well). Manual Test needed.
• Seminar Groups, of say 20 at a time. Duration 1 hour.
• Manual Test needed.
• Showing a Video to groups. Duration 1 hour
• (including Q and A time). Manual Test needed.
• DSEasy® software. 15 minutes each. Test included

DSEasy® is very PRO-ACTIVE and prompts the user to make changes to their workstation and set up as they go through. Every time a user does this they are saving assessor time and costs.

Before an assessment takes place, the health and safety training needs to have been provided and an Ergonomic Checklist completed, as part of the assessment. This is sometime referred to as self-assessment. It is but in itself it is not a DSE Workstation Assessment.

That assessment is to be conducted face to face with the user at their workstation by a Trained DSE Assessor.

A user who has received health and safety training, will be in a position to complete the checklist, but this training IS NOT sufficient for them to complete an assessment of their workstation.

The Assessor needs to have received the Training as laid out in the DSE Regulations: Who should do assessments. P 15 of the new Regulations published April 2003.

The reality for most large employers is that they do not want all their users to have all the answers to problems at a workstation. They and the Regulations want the users trained to identify problems and for a trained assessor to put matters right in accordance with the employers guidelines.

Therefore ‘self-assessment’ is not an option for compliance.

 Typical DSE Compliance strategies for 1,000 users

The case for DSEasy® is compelling, saving £25,000 as well as delivering on-line management reporting and prioritising users at risk.