Daily working hours were reduced from more than seven hours to six hours in physically demanding care work in three cities in Sweden and Norway Reduced neck and shoulder pain was observed but not low back pain In physically demanding care work daily working hours were reduced from more than seven hours to six hours The comparison was made with workers in similar workplaces who did not benefit from a reduction in working hours In all intervention groups the occurrence of neck shoulder pain was reduced by 15 No reduction in pain was observed in the reference groups Wergeland et al 2003 7 Technical engineering or ergonomic interventions The effects of measures to reduce the physical load in manual handling have been well studied in the laboratory but the number of field studies with comparison groups is small In a critical review of 18 such studies by van der Molen et al 2005a 8 seven out of eight studies involving only engineering controls e g mechanical aids found a reduction in physical work demands Six studies that involved engineering and organisational controls also showed a decrease in workload Ten studies that reported the effect on MSD symptoms did not show consistent results
