Abstract
AbstractRailway truck maintenance plays a crucial role for rail transport. It aims at ensuring the availability of the equipment and the safety of the operations. However, maintenance activities often involve uncommon work and nonroutine tasks and it is obvious that maintenance operators are more threatened than other employees to be exposed to various hazards in their workplace. In Tunisia, the prevalence of occupational accidents and injuries among maintenance workers is not well documented. The target of this cross‐sectional study is to assess ergonomics risks associated with maintenance activities in a railway company. Data collection was carried out through a self‐administrated questionnaire and via direct observations. The Body Parts Symptom Survey (BPSS) was used to identify the discomfort level of the workers. More than 100 maintenance operators working in nine different workshops were involved in this study. From BPSS results, this paper proposed a new method to calculate the discomfort index related to each body part in order to calculate the global discomfort index (GDI) for each workshop. Results showed that the most hazardous workshop was rail‐car maintenance workshop (GDI = 43.06). Four main tasks were assessed with normalized score. Final scores were found to be extremely high. To remedy the raised problems, new adjustable workstations were proposed, which showed a considerable improvement on workers’ postures.
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