The Design 4 Health National Manual Handling Campaign 2004 was conducted in Australia. The
campaign industry summary report showed that manual handling risk management has significantly
improved in the past five years. Particularly, with the increased promotion of safe patient handling in
the workplace, the audit results show that the risks of patient handling were well managed. However,
improvements are required in non-clinical areas such as kitchens and food services. Risk
assessments in these areas were not undertaken in a systematic manner and were arranged on an
ad-hoc basis. In some cases no assessment had been done. This audit result reflects the opportunity to improve the management of risks in manual handling tasks in non-clinical areas (Australian
Occupational Health and Safety Agencies 2005).