Manual Handling

Practical, honest training in moving loads safely — law, risk assessment, technique, equipment and culture — for practitioners who handle for a living.

Overview

This course takes practitioners from the legal foundations of manual handling in England and Wales to the daily habits that keep a workforce intact. It is built around the Manual Handling Operations Regulations 1992 (as amended) and their fixed hierarchy — avoid, assess, reduce — together with the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, the equipment regulations (PUWER and LOLER 1998), RIDDOR 2013, and the HSE’s free assessment tools: the MAC, RAPP, V-MAC and ART.

The teaching moves deliberately from understanding to action: how handling injures the body and why most damage is cumulative; how to screen risk with TILE and score it with the HSE tools; what good technique looks like and — honestly — where its protection ends; how aids and equipment sit above technique in the control hierarchy; how to manage the harder cases of pushing, pulling, team moves and awkward loads; and how reporting, records and culture hold the whole system together. Lifting technique cannot be learned from slides alone — this course should be paired with supervised hands-on practice, and it tells learners plainly that technique training alone does not prevent injury.

Who this course is for

Assumes workplace experience but no prior handling training. Not sufficient preparation for assessing complex operations or for moving people, and it says so wherever that matters.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the course, learners can:

Career path

Manual handling competence is usually held alongside a main role, but it is a recognised foundation for wider safety responsibility. Honest sequencing matters: each step below needs its own training and, at the top end, mentored experience.

Course structure

Each module closes with an Apply and Reflect exercise. Module 7 opens with a practitioner-support note, plus a 20-question knowledge check with a trainer-only answer key.

Frequently asked questions

Q. Is this a licence or a legal qualification?

No. It is CPD. No law in England and Wales requires a specific ‘manual handling certificate’; this course is evidence toward the employer’s training duty, nothing more.

Q. Will it make me a manual handling assessor or trainer?

No. It will make you a much better contributor to assessments and a sharper reviewer of them. Assessing complex operations, and training others, require recognised routes and mentored practice beyond this course.

Q. Does it cover moving people — patients, residents, fallen colleagues?

Deliberately not, beyond the boundary itself. Moving people requires sector-specific training, equipment and individual handling plans. This course teaches one thing on the topic: do not manually lift a person — summon trained help.

Q. Is the course accredited, and how many CPD points is it worth?

Accreditation, certifying body and CPD point values are provider decisions and are not claimed here — they must be confirmed truthfully before publication.

Q. Does it apply outside England and Wales?

The statutory references are stated for England and Wales; the same GB-wide regulations apply in Scotland. Northern Ireland has separate provisions.

Q. Is online-only delivery enough?

For the knowledge content, yes. For lifting technique and aid use, honestly, no — pair this course with supervised hands-on practice using real loads and aids.

Q. Are the 25 kg / 16 kg figures legal weight limits?

No. They are HSE screening filters that assume ideal conditions, and they shrink with every TILE failure. There is no legal maximum lifting weight in Great Britain — only a duty to avoid, assess and reduce risk.

Q. How often should this training be refreshed?

There is no single statutory interval. Common practice is a refresher every 1–3 years and whenever tasks, loads, equipment or duties change materially.

MANUAL HANDLING · 20 CPD HOURS · ACCREDITED BY CPD STANDARDS OFFICE · EIGHT MODULES