Manual handling training and risk assessment software

What UK law requires on manual handling

Manual handling — lifting, lowering, pushing, pulling, carrying or moving loads by hand or bodily force — is one of the most common causes of workplace injury in the UK. Musculoskeletal disorders, and back injuries in particular, account for a large share of the over-7-day injuries employers must report under RIDDOR, and they drive a significant proportion of sickness absence.

The Manual Handling Operations Regulations 1992 (MHOR), which sit under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, set out a clear hierarchy. You must avoid hazardous manual handling so far as is reasonably practicable; where it cannot be avoided, you must assess the risk; and you must reduce the risk of injury to the lowest level reasonably practicable. The HSE's assessment approach is built around TILE — Task, Individual, Load and Environment (sometimes TILEO, adding Other factors such as PPE or time pressure).

Crucially, the law expects you to be able to demonstrate all of this. A verbal claim that staff 'know how to lift' will not satisfy an HSE inspector or stand up to a personal injury claim. You need recorded training and recorded, suitable and sufficient risk assessments.

• Avoid: eliminate or redesign hazardous manual handling where reasonably practicable (mechanical aids, deliveries to point of use, smaller loads).
• Assess: carry out a TILE/TILEO risk assessment for handling that cannot be avoided.
• Reduce: put controls in place to bring the risk of injury to the lowest level reasonably practicable.
• Train: provide manual handling information and training, and keep it current.
• Review: reassess when the task, load, people or environment change.

Manual handling training your team actually completes — and you can prove

Featherstone Safety Hub includes a manual handling e-learning course as part of its awareness training. You assign it to the right people, they complete it online at their own pace, and the completion is recorded automatically against the individual — no chasing paper certificates or spreadsheets. The pass threshold is built in, so a completion means the person actually demonstrated understanding, not just clicked through.

For practical, hands-on manual handling sessions — the toolbox demonstrations and supervised technique training that e-learning cannot replace — the manual training log lets you record who attended, when, what was covered and who delivered it. Online and in-person training sit together in one record, so your evidence is complete.

• Assign and deliver: give the manual handling course to the employees whose roles need it.
• Auto-recorded completions: passes are logged automatically against each person, with the date.
• Practical sessions too: record supervised, hands-on manual handling training in the manual training log.
• One training record: e-learning and in-person training appear together per employee.

Build defensible manual handling risk assessments

The risk assessment module lets you produce manual handling risk assessments that follow the structure the HSE expects. You describe the task, the people doing it, the load and the environment, score the risk with the built-in matrix, record the controls you have put in place, and set a review date. The finished assessment exports to PDF for staff, clients, insurers or inspectors.

Because every assessment is stored in one place with its review date tracked, you never lose sight of when a manual handling assessment is due to be revisited — for example after a new piece of equipment is introduced, a process changes, or someone returns from a back injury on modified duties.

• TILE structure: capture Task, Individual, Load and Environment factors in a guided assessment.
• Built-in risk matrix: score likelihood × severity and get a clear risk rating.
• Controls and review dates: record the controls in place and when the assessment must be reviewed.
• PDF export: produce a professional, shareable assessment for inspectors, insurers or clients.

Refreshers, evidence and the audit trail

Manual handling competence is not a one-off. Good practice is to refresh training periodically — commonly around every three years, and sooner where the work is higher risk or an incident has occurred. The training matrix shows, at a glance, who is current, who is expiring soon and who is overdue, and alerts you before refreshers lapse so gaps do not open up unnoticed.

Every certificate can be stored in the evidence library, and every action you take — training completed, assessment reviewed, refresher booked — leaves a dated entry in the audit trail. If a manual handling injury ever leads to an HSE investigation or a personal injury claim, you can produce the training records and risk assessments that show you took your MHOR duties seriously before the event, not after.

• Expiry alerts: the training matrix flags manual handling refreshers before they lapse.
• Certificate storage: keep training certificates in the evidence library against each person.
• Dated audit trail: every training and assessment action is timestamped — your due-diligence record.
• RIDDOR-ready: manual handling injuries that cause over-7-day absence are RIDDOR reportable; the incident tools screen for it.