Traffic Management Contractors: what are you doing to protect your workforce from manual handling injuries?

Manual handling training is widely delivered across the sector, but are the generic ‘off the shelf’ courses suitable for the types of activities required for traffic management works?

Traffic management is carried out in environments that are anything but generic — and the manual handling risks faced by operatives on the highway are fundamentally different from those in most other industries.

In many sectors, manual handling training is built around predictable objects in controlled settings: lifting a box from a stable surface, carrying it a short distance, and placing it down again. That model does not reflect the reality of most traffic management operations.

Consider what a traffic management operative actually handles day to day:

• Cones where grip varies depending upon the size and type of cone, lifted repeatedly, often from restricted spaces such as cone wells at the rear of vehicles
• Frames and signs that vary in size, shape, weight and material, often loaded to / unloaded from the rear of a vehicle 
• Sandbags that vary significantly in weight and shape – sometimes purchased pre-filled offering a more consistent weight, but often filled manually in depots, meaning no two bags are the same, 
• Environmental factors such as wet or frozen sand, which can substantially increase weight and alter handling characteristics, slippery cone turrets, frames and signs, all of which is rarely lifted symmetrically 

Lifting the above equipment is not the same as lifting a box. Deploying cones from a cone well frequently involves lifting, twisting, turning, and reaching, and placing equipment on the highway brings an array of other considerations where footing alone can vary enormously; stepping down from vehicles, walking on verges (varying from hard to soft), gravel, or uneven ground – add poor weather, low light, traffic proximity, and time pressures, and the risk profile changes again.

Yet many operatives are still trained using off-the-shelf manual handling content that does not acknowledge these realities. The result is training that may be compliant on paper, but not necessarily suitable or sufficient in practice when it comes to protecting the workforce from musculoskeletal injuries, potentially leaving both the Employer and the Employee exposed – This gap is exactly why bespoke, task-specific training matters.

When manual handling training is built around:

• The actual equipment used on the highway
• The real postures, movements, and constraints operatives experience
• The environmental and weather-related variables that affect risk

…it becomes far more than a compliance exercise and more of a genuine potential injury-reduction measure.

That thinking is what led us to develop a traffic management specific manual handling course, designed explicitly around the realities of highway operations and certificated by Lantra, the same awarding body that certifies the NHSS12 traffic management qualifications used across the industry.

This is not about promotion or positioning, but about confronting whether current practices genuinely reflect operational reality.

As an industry, over the years we have made significant progress in governance, standards and safe systems of work. Manual handling deserves the same level of industry-specific thinking, that better serves the workforce as opposed to more generic measures transferred from other industries.

Protecting the workforce starts by recognising that traffic management is different and unique in many of it’s activities – and treating it that way.