ABSTRACT
In a landmark court case in 1993, brought by the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) against Reuters, Mr Justice Prosser famously quoted as saying that the term repetitive strain injury (RSI) had “…no place in the medical dictionary”. At the time he was widely mis-reported as saying that RSI did not exist! The NUJ lost their case on that occasion, but in recent years there have been many successful RSI compensation claims and some of them have advantageously cited the absence of risk assessments as a contributory factor to the injury. “If it’s not written down, it didn’t happen” seems to be the attitude of the courts. This alarmed one national newspaper group who realised they were vulnerable in this area. The decision was taken to train internal risk assessors and at the same time involve an external contractor to make a start on the backlog of approximately 2000 assessments. The use of an external contractor gave credibility to the assessment process and supported the internal assessors while they gained sufficient experience to take over the running, monitoring and reviewing of the assessment programme.
