Our colleagues at Wessex Packaging have worked with Bespoke Wellbeing Ltd to analyse how warehouse teams manually wrap pallets, and you can now download their musculo skeletal disorder hand pallet wrapping risk report.
As palletisation packaging experts, we understand the movements and processes that warehouse operative go through as they wrap pallets by hand. The work that’s been done with Bespoke Wellbeing, who are specialist occupational health physiotherapists, analyses the potential risks of musculo skeletal disorder (MSD), and supports our view of how many warehouse teams are wrapping pallets.
NHS England says that musculo skeletal disorder can affect the joints, bones and muscles, and also rarer autoimmune diseases and back pain. It can be caused by bending, crouching, twisting, stretching, repetitive work, pulling, pushing and stress (source: Health and Safety Executive).
When the Surepack and Wessex Packaging teams visit logistics, supply chain and manufacturing centres across the UK, we often see warehouse teams wrapping pallets, in a whole variety of methods, not all necessarily the most ergonomic! As a result, Alex Long, MCSP, Occupational Health and Physiotherapist Specialist, was asked to analyse the processes to really see what a warehouse worker goes through as they wrap a pallet with stretch film manually.
This detailed analysis is show in this video where the pressure points and areas of risk as the warehouse worker goes around the pallet are highlighted in red.
Alex also reported on his findings, and how the risk of musculo skeletal disorder can be reduced, in his report, which can be downloaded here: https://wessexpkg.co.uk/wrapping-msd-report/
Throughout Britain’s supply chain pallets and their loads play a vital part, but too often the bending, crouching, twisting and stretching involved when manually wrapping them in stretch film, goes unnoticed.
So, if members of your warehouse team are incurring lost days through strains, muscle ache and back pain, then it is worth reviewing how they are wrapping pallets.
Ask Chuen here at Surepack for one of our pallet wrap audits, and see how he can help improve the ergonomics and efficiency of your pallet wrapping process. He is happy to come to your warehouse and work with your team, on a no-obligation basis.
Contact Surepack on 0117 960 8706 or email us at sales@surepack. We’re happy to help.