Working With Display Screen Equipment
Did you know that there are regulations for working with display screen equipment? Especially if you work with screens for a long period of time. This may seem silly since we spend a lot of time on our own phones and smart devices. However, it’s important to know about the regulations to help yourself and your employees. To help them to know what they should do to help themselves. So we’re going to go through the regulations and see what you need to do.
The Health and Safety Regulations for display screen equipment apply to two types of workers. These are:
- They work at home on a permanent or long-term basis,
- They routinely split their time between their workplace and home (hybrid working)
You can establish what makes you or your workers DSE users by if they work on DSE daily for continuous periods of time, for an hour or more. These regulations don’t apply to workers who use DSE occasionally or only for a short period of time either at work or at home.
Risk Assessment
If the regulations do apply, you need to carry out DSE risk assessments for individual workers. You or your workers may need to complete a self-assessment, provided you have been given suitable training. For example, by explaining how to use an ergonomic checklist or self-assessment tool. You can also find this practical workstation checklist to help you to make simple DSE decisions and assessments and to record and communicate the findings.
Where workers use DSE in the home and office, the assessment should cover both situations. You need to make sure that you or your workers who work from home can achieve a comfortable and sustainable posture. They may not need office furniture or equipment at home to achieve this. But you need to check if the equipment is suitable.
Managing the risks
You need to make sure that you can implement the findings of your assessment for you and your workers who use Display Screen Equipment. Make sure you reduce the risks that have been identified by your assessment as reasonably and as practically as possible. This means balancing the level of risk against the measures needed to control the real-life risk in terms of money, time or trouble.
Keep your DSE arrangements under review, particularly if there have been significant changes. Check if your existing control measures are sufficient or whether additional steps are needed. For example, if your workers report aches, pains or discomfort.
Additional DSE needs
Use your assessments to decide if people need any additional equipment when working at home. Alongside information provided by the worker, you may need to ask for competent advice. Such as:
- A suitably trained DSE Assessor
- Relevant occupational health professional
You should meet additional individual needs as reasonably as possible. Once you have done all of that, you have hit the regulations for display screens. You need to keep this up regularly so you’re always keeping on top of things and how you can work better and more efficiently at home.
If you have any questions about the regulations then please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us!
Steve is a Chartered Manager and a Fellow of the Chartered Management Institute.
He provides Educational Consultancy to the 19+ sector as well as being an Assessor, IQA, EPA and Digital Marketing Professional. When not doing any of these he finds time, every now and then, to write blogs and articles.
