Management of musculoskeletal pain among hand screen printing workers pre and post design analysis

Abstract

Hand screen printing (HSP) industry is a one of the unorganized textile processing industry, where the required colour design are printed on the cloth. Workers of the HSP industry are suffering from unnoticed and unreported work related musculoskeletal disorder (WMSD) because of poor work place design and lack of ergonomic knowledge. Evaluation of WMSD in HSP industry is very much needed since many people are from rural and semi urban area depends on this industry for their occupation and life hood. The main objective of this study is to identify the various risk factors associated with the occurrence of WMSD among the HSP workers and to provide suitable solution in order to reduce the occurrence of WMSD considering ergonomical aspects. A cross sectional study was conducted among 385 workers from 41 HSP industry located in Erode, Western part of Tamil Nadu, INDIA. A standard Nordic questionnaire was employed to conduct a self-administrative questionnaire survey to find out the various factors associated with the occurrence of WMSD among HSP workers. The results revealed that 62.5 % of sampling population are suffering from WMSD on any of their body region, Low back pain (75.1%) was most prevalent, it was followed by shoulder pain (66.2%) and knee (58.7%). A postural analysis was carried out using Rapid Entire Body Assessment (REBA) method to identify the critical work posture associated with HSP. It was found that the work posture involved during the HSP activity had very high risk to the worker s health and needs immediate revision when compared with other operations involved in HSP industry. newline