Health and Safety — how that too is being impacted by Covid and Working from Home
By: Nigel Dupree S.M.A.R.T
Tags: Screentime, Wellness, HR, Computers, Health And Safety

Photo by Bird Liang on Unsplash

Health and Safety — how that too is being impacted by Covid and Working from Home Nigel Dupree S.M.A.R.T Apr 1·3 min read

Confucius said, “if you don’t know where you are going, you are sure to end up somewhere else.”

This absolutely seems to be the case amongst the Health & Safety Professionals that are more used to dealing with “reasonably foreseeable” tangible hazards and risks, and not so confident when it comes to stressors of another kind.

Indeed at a recent conference, they have been asking themselves, “should mental health really be the future focus for safety and health practitioners?”

I think we can all agree that after the last 18 months or so it absolutely should be, and it may well have been a tongue-in-cheek piece, but it does perhaps shed some light on why 58% or more, of Display Screen Equipment (DSE) operators, were suffering presenteeism, were effectively self-harming( think about it…)by carrying-on regardless of eye-strain, Computer Vision Syndrome, Screen Fatigue and/or Zoom Fatigue.

Why? Because H&S were unaware/ignoring and in denial about it.

Screen Fatigue also referred to as Computer Vision Syndrome, is one health and safety issue that caught many on the back foot and is causing untold damage.

A quick scroll of social media under the #screenfatigue and #zoomfatigue shows how prevalent these issues are.

Now, unless they, (let’s call them the self-harmers) were made aware of the above, (and thankfully social media is really coming up trumps in this area), or they knew/know about 2019 BSI ISO 30071.1 DSE Accessibility Standards that enable and encourage “reasonable adjustments” to their working area, i.e. personal custom and optimal DSE Interface Calibration, the self-harmers will carry on regardless.

With many H&S, and HR professionals not knowing about basic I&D issues, e.g. that calibrating screens can save and assist eyesight, and may also help to recover an average of 20% lost productivity, going forward post COVID, whether Working From Home (WFH) or returning to the office, not much will improve.

How do we know this? Because only 1 in 10 is DSE compliant.

One shudders to think of the numbers after a year of working from home.

The visual repetitive stress injuries sustained when working on screen, and /or monocular adaptations presenting in myopic (short-sighted) and asthenopic (eye strain) disease may well have been dismissed prior to, and certainly post 2007, as nobody knew what to do about it, so they just called it a “temporary visual anomaly”.

Which is sadly not true.

This denial perpetuated the over-exposure to sub-optimally calibrated standard, out of the box, display screens but, this issue could no longer be ignored when the WHO ICD-10 included the scaling of repetitive stress injuries resulting from near or close-up eye-strain in 2016.

Eye strain that was, and is exacerbated by prolonged periods on-screen, with insufficient ambient day and/or artificial work lighting in many offices.

CIBSE, WCAG & BSI, have made outstanding contributions in determining human health risk factors in both the built environment and operator equipment; the “visual ergonomics” surrounding operators interface. Validating the work done by the S.M.A.R.T. Foundation UK developing a “Digital Literacy Aid” or Display Screen Optimiser (DSO) working with functionally illiterate children, as a therapeutic intervention rehabilitating 3D binocular vision, mitigating lost functional literacy, and helping those children that had fallen through the gaps because they couldn’t read well.

Calibrating your screen is a simple and easy step to mitigating the risks of computer vision syndrome, and it’s one simple move we wish more people know about.

HR and H&s need to know where they are heading in this regard, otherwise, DSE operators will continue to suffer, and it won’t be long before the lawsuits mount up.

A case in point: A legally blind man who cannot see “faces or text” has claimed that Dell is violating federal accessibility laws by maintaining an improperly formatted website and online store.

You may think, well he’s legally blind, but how is your eyesight fairing working online all day?

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