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Dept of Health

Answer

Mrs. Calton: To ask the Secretary of State for Health if he will make a statement on compliance within the NHS with the NHS Manual Handling Regulations. [119690] Mr. Hutton: The Manual Handling Operations Regulations 1992 (as amended) apply to all work activities and are the responsibility of the Department of Work and Pensions. The National audit Office report, "A Safer Place to Work--Improving the Management of Health and Safety Risks to Staff in NHS Trusts", showed a reduction of 33 per cent. in manual handling accidents over the last three years. The Department is reviewing approaches taken by national health service trusts in evaluating compliance with the current guidance and will be considering the need for a more consistent approach to evaluation. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) enforces the above regulations in NHS trusts and other healthcare premises and assesses compliance with the regulations as a key part of most trust inspections. I am informed that the HSE has not prosecuted any NHS trusts for breaches of the regulations, but it has served a number of individual trusts with statutory notices requiring them to improve compliance with various requirements of the regulations. Information on the number of statutory notices served in English NSH trusts since 1998-99 is shown in the following table: _________________________________________________________________________________________________. Number of notices 1998-99 6 1999-2000 10 2000-01 6 2001-02 13 2002-03 119 _________________________________________________________________________________________________. 1 Provisional figure

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

119690; 407 c576W;407 c579-80W

Session

2002-03

Subjects

Health and safety NHS Safety measures

Contains statistics

Yes

Link

View this Written question on www.publications.parliament.uk