Recently published article, Workplacelaw magazine, April 2007

DSE: why are employers still not complying?

by Gerald Whitehouse, CEO, Chaos Ergonomics

“Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow, he who would search for pearls, must dive below."

A quotation from John Dryden (1631-1700), but so apt today. The point of this statement, with relevance to the Health and Safety (Display Screen Equipment) (DSE) Regulations, is that to find a solution we have to do more than complete a DSE Assessment.

There are six Regulations within the DSE Regulations that are critical to compliance. Namely:

• Regulation 2: analysis of workstations to assess and reduce risks;
• Regulation 3: requirements for workstations;
• Regulation 4: daily work routine of users;
• Regulation 5: eyes and eyesight;
• Regulation 6: provision of Training; and
• Regulation 7: provision of Information.

The DSE Regulations came into force, believe it or not, 15 years ago in 1992, and were updated in 2003. They stem from European Directive 90/270EEC, which is designed to prevent physical, visual and mental problems in people who work with computers.

Compliance with the Regulations is law and mandatory if you employ five or more DSE users. The penalty for non-compliance could be imprisonment. However no one as yet has ever been imprisoned. In practice your local DSE enforcing authority, the Environmental Health Department of your local council, or the HSE itself if you are what is termed a Crown Body, which includes Councils themselves, the Police, Fire, Ambulance services and Government, will, if you are not compliant with the legislation, serve an Improvement Notice on you.

You then need to become compliant within a period of time, maybe three months. If you do not heed this Improvement Notice they can issue a Prohibition Order or decide to prosecute you. The maximum fine in a lower court is £5,000; in a higher court the penalty is unlimited.

The other painful scenario of non-compliance is when a member of your staff takes you to Court for loss of earnings, because they claim they have developed a Work Related Upper Limb Disorder (WRULD) and are unable to work any more because your organisation was non-compliant

and did not provide the necessary training or risk; assessment as required in the DSE Regulations. The payments can run, and have run, into the £100,000s, so be warned.

Which members of staff using a computer are deemed users? This is probably the first point of call for many organizations. When the Regulations first came into being committees were formed to interpret the legislation and decide who was and who was not a user as defined in Regulation one. There are nearly ten pages def1ning who is / is not / or maybe a user. Much valuable tin1e and debate was therefore spent in coming up with the criteria for their own organisation, tin1e probably better spent getting on with the job and carrying out compliance. The reason I say this is because if you classify someone as not being a DSE user then you still need to assess their risk, under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations and then you have two streams of assessment going on. What happens if someone using a computer who you deem not a user, as defined in the Regulations, develops RSI or a WRULD? They sue and a court of law will decide if they are a user or not. Your solicitor will say they are not and the plaintiff's solicitor will say they are. Therefore I recommend that you take advice from the Regulations themselves. P.5 Regulation 1, Guidance section 17 states, "...It is an option to simply decide that all staff who have access to DSE will be treated as users. This can save effort and allow resources to be concentrated on identifying, prioritising and remedying risks." Sound advice.

Our research shows that 80% of organisations are not complying fully with the DSE Regulations. You do have to ask yourself as to why this is. I'd like £1 for every time I've heard: "It'll cost us too much," "We'll take the risk that no one will sue us," "We've never had a visit from an inspector in the past, so why should we now." Compliance is really pretty straight forward, and there are logical steps to take to make this happen.

Firstly deal with Regulations six and seven; these can be grouped together, so you deliver the Provision of Information, which includes advice of risk at a workstation, at the same time as you deliver training to a user. You can deliver this part in a number of ways. You can choose between:

• face to face with a DSE Assessor;
• by group seminar; reading of booklets! leaflets;
• viewing a PowerPoint presentation;
• video; DVD; or software.

You should ensure that you have a means of recording what training was given, and when and how it happened. You should also have a means of proving, in a court of law, that the training has been effective. You need a recorded test.

I personally don't like flat pass marks. If a user gets, say, 80% right, the 20% that they've got wrong, might be the most important 20%, and their failure to understand that critical 20% puts them and you at risk. I like a system that picks up where a user has misunderstood, not understood their training so that an assessor can spend one minute retraining on this specific aspect. Some training options are more labour / time intensive than others and some more costly, the choice is yours. The most important thing is that all your users receive this information. The Regulation six, Guidance 91 states, "It is good practice for this training to be given before users take part in risk assessments". In Regulation two, Guidance 39, in bold it states,
"Whatever type of checklist is used, employers should ensure workers have received the necessary training before being asked to complete one".
This makes good practical sense, in that the checklist may ask: Is your monitor at the correct height for you? Unless a user has had training as to what the correct height should be, the user cannot answer this question properly.

Secondly, organisations should undertake DSE workstation assessments; these are based on the checklist the user has completed, and should be carried out by a trained DSE Assessor. Regulation 2, Guidance 42 and 43, tell us exactly what training and knowledge a DSE Assessor needs. I advise that the training and completion of the checklist should be undertaken when assessors are in place and you can manage the expectations of each user. If they have problems outstanding then they will be expecting some action from you. A good way of achieving this is to have in stock a small supply of footrests / document holders / ergonomic mice / monitor riser blocks, which can then be installed at the time of an assessor visit.

I am frequently asked whether every user needs a visit for a workstation assessment to be carried out, and indeed sometimes told that not everyone needs an assessment visit. However, the Regulations state a workstation assessment shall take place, it also states who can do the assessments, as mentioned above. In my experience no organisation wants all users trained as DSE Assessors, to find them taking out their Lux light meters every day, and complaining that the fluorescent lights are above their workstation when they should be adjacent to them. This knowledge is for assessors. Therefore I conclude that general user training as per the Regulations is not training to undertake a DSE Workstation assessment but training to complete the ergonomic checklist. Therefore to comply with the legislation every workstation needs a visit.

Having said that, what is of primary importance here is that you visit higher risk users as soon as possible. A paper based system does not readily help you prioritise visits as it is very time consuming to go manually through hundreds of paper checklists to find those with the highest risk, but good software that prioritises risk scores will do so, and then you should be able to find those who have aches and pains at the click of a mouse. You can then go and see these users first.

Remember if you eliminate aches and pains, you eliminate RSI / WRULDs: If you eliminate those you eliminate a user suing for loss of earnings.

I do believe that if you put into your DSE compliance strategy policy that high risk users will be seen within two weeks, medium risk within six weeks, low within three months and no known risk users within 12 months, then you will be compliant.

There real hidden benefits to being properly compliant with the legislation. Your staff will appreciate the fact that you are investing in their wellbeing. By preventing RSI/WRULDs

in your workplace you will have a real effect on your bottom line, in that no costly days off with backache should occur; You will not be sued, nor will you have an Improvement Notice served on you.

Gerald Whitehouse is Chief Executive of Chaos Ergonomics which specialises in the DSE Regulations and offers DSEasy, a DSE Training and Assessment software package/DSE Assessor Training Courses and DSE Assessments Nationwide.

DSEasy Administration Suite new Features
(Posted 6th June 2006)

As part of our continued commitment to developing DSEasy into the world’s best DSE Training and assessment programme, we are pleased to announce two new features within our DSEasy Administration Suite.

Please log into DSEasy and see Data Explorer left hand side menu. This Feature enables you to see who has reported the same Issues. Also enables you to see at node level where the most Issues arise.

In Issues Management screen, new command button: Show All Answers.

This enables you to print out the whole of the Checklist and Test results. The Issues answers as well as the non-Issue ones. This may be needed as a hard copy for the user themselves or HR department.

New Chaos Ergonomics Web site Launched
(Posted 1st June 2006)

The new Web site of Chaos Ergonomics is now online - as you can see of course! Designed by Cookie Dude Web Design, the new site affirms Chaos Ergonomics' commitment to assisting their clients to meet all Display Screen Equipment Regulations.

For the past ten years, Chaos Ergonomics has provided the most comprehensive range of services available anywhere in the UK, for all companies to be DSE compliant.

The new site aims to be very much a part of this; offering advice not only about Chaos Ergonomics and its divisions, but also medical, legal and health & safety information essential for any company attempting DSE compliance.