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job dictionary

JOB DICTIONARY

“A ‘job dictionary’ is a collection of the physical demands of jobs within your organisation aimed at reducing the physical risks to workers.

In short, a job dictionary can provide your organisation a screening system to ‘match’ job roles to candidates who are physically capable of performing in the role with a low risk of injury.”

Physiotherapists and occupational therapists use the latest industry supported equipment to assess the physical forces, frequencies, range of movement, strength, postures and overall environment to categorise the job into a ‘high’, ‘medium’ or ‘low’ risk classifications.

As an organisation you can then:

  • Perform functional (physical) capacity assessments on workers to ensure that the job role suits their physical fitness
  • OR enable your organisation to identify ‘high risk’ tasks and subsequently perform risk assessments to make improvements to the way the job is undertaken, ultimately to reduce the ‘manual handling’ risk to the workers in the role.

Depending on the focus of your ‘job dictionary’, it can be written with the addition of a ‘risk assessment’ or ‘safe operating procedure’ attached to inform workers on how to perform the tasks within that role with as little risk as possible.

Risk Assessment

A risk assessment forms part of the risk management framework for most organisations. Our risk assessments comprise of a comprehensive screening strategy to assess potential physical risks to workers for particular tasks.

Not only do our tools identify potential risks to workers, but we also offer solutions to reduce these risks through clinical recommendations and links to strategies or equipment to improve the process of the task

Safe Working Instruction
A safe work instruction (or otherwise known as an ‘SOP’) is a set of steps that have been developed for workers to follow in order to perform a physical task safely.

The safe work instruction is typically based on a previous assessment of the task and is developed in conjunction with safe operating procedures and the policies and procedures unique to your organisation.

Functional Capacity Assessment

You may have heard of a ‘physical’ capacity assessment that workers often undertake prior to acquiring new employment. We believe that physical capacity assessments often create a ‘gap’ between the worker’s physical ability and their ability to perform these same skills under different conditions.

A ‘functional’ capacity assessment screens the physical ability of the worker, but then applies this information to a specific job role to ensure that the test is actually reflective of the physical requirements for the job.  Each job role has different demands, so why assess all workers using one standardized assessment?

The information that forms the functional capacity assessment often comes from information collected in a job dictionary that is specific to your organisation.

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