HFEM-SOSCO Program (3) 2017

Ergonomics for Safety and Health Practitioners is a third program organized by HFEM and supported by SOCSO. This program has been successfully held at PERODUA Learning Centre, Rawang, Selangor on June 6, 2017 (Tuesday).

Ergonomics awareness has a substantial impact on the industry, organization, management, employees and overall well-being of the system [1], [2]. The awareness of ergonomics is crucial to safety and health practitioners because it helps in ergonomics application and significantly contributes to human well-being and safety [3] and to ensure the implementation of ergonomics [4]. The effective implementation of ergonomics requires a great cooperation and active involvement of OSH practitioners and the OSH Committee in the workplace. Determining ergonomics risk factors at workplace should be taken as a priority because the effect of poor ergonomics practice takes time to occur and may appear after the retirement [5]. Furthermore, this program also highlighted on the importance of avoiding or reducing musculoskeletal injuries and exposing the participants on the method to implement the ergonomics control. Apart from that, participants gained some new inputs on proactive prevention strategies such as office stretching, back strengthening exercises and simple balloon exercises.

[1] Gungor C (2009) A human factors and ergonomics awareness survey of professional personnel in the American furniture industry, Msc. Thesis, Mississippi State University, US.
[2] Sundstrom, L. (2000) “Better Work Environment for Small Companies in Sweden,” in Proceeding of The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting B6, pp 175-177.
[3] Kroemer, K.H.E. and Grandjean, E. (1997) Fitting The Task to The Human : A Textbook of Occupational Ergonomics.5th Edition. London, Taylor and Francis.
[4] Rozlina, M. S.,  Awaluddin, M.S.,  Hamid, S. H. S. A., and Norhayati, Z. (2013) “Exploratory Analysis of Ergonomics Importance at Workplace and Safety Culture Amongst Occupational Safety and Health Practitioners” in G.-C. Yang et al. (eds.), IAENG Transactions on Engineering Technologies, Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering 229, DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-6190-2_8.
[5] Cooper,M.D., Philips, R. A. (2004) Exploratory analysis of the safety climate and safety behaviour relationship. J Saf Res 35:497–512.