Your job
This forklift driver carries out a pre-start inspection of his forklift at the beginning of each day, to make sure everything is in order. It doesn't take long to go through the checklist, and most of the time there's nothing special to report.
But every now and then he picks up a problem, which he either fixes himself or refers on to the maintenance mechanic. Whenever that happens, it reminds him that a pre-start inspection is a much better way of finding a hazard than discovering something's suddenly gone wrong halfway through a heavy lift.
'Be prepared' is a simple motto, but it's a good one. The more preparation you put into dealing with potential safety problems before you start a job, the less likely you are to be confronted with any nasty surprises while you're working.
In this section, we'll look at the process of identifying hazards and how to take steps to control them. In particular, we'll examine the types of hazards that can cause manual handling injuries, especially back injuries. And we'll talk about what to do in the event of an emergency evacuation on-site.
You may think as you go through this section that all of the advice being offered is commonsense – which, of course, it is. But so often people get hurt at work when they don't follow their own better judgement, either because they're taking shortcuts to get a job done more quickly, or because they've fallen into bad habits and become careless.
So it's a good idea to take a step back and think about the hazards you face each day and what you can do about minimising them. As anyone who's ever been injured knows: 'Prevention is better than cure'.
Here's your job
- Have a look at the Task for this section to preview the questions you'll need to answer at the end.
- Work through each of the lessons for more detailed information on the concepts covered, and complete the learning activity at the end of each topic.
- Complete the Task. You can hear how Anton has handled the questions by going to the case study.
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