Physical employment standards for UK royal navy personnel: A survey of tasks that require muscle strength and endurance

Abstract

Introduction: Physical Employment Standards (PES) safeguard the requirement to create a suitable jobperson fit in military occupations, and in doing so mitigate some operational and musculoskeletal injury risk. The primary purpose of this research was to identify critical-physically demanding tasks performed by UK Royal Navy(RN) seafarers to inform the development of a muscle strength and endurance-based PES. A secondary purpose was toexplore possible sex and age-based differences in subjective ratings of occupational task physical demand. Materialsand Methods: In accordance with the Ministry of Defence Research Ethics Committee, 515 Naval personnel (443males, 72 females; aged 30.2 ± 7.3 years) completed an anonymous survey that rated the physical demand (from no tovery high), criticality (from not to critically important), and frequency (from seldom to several times per day) of 25common sea-going tasks on a one to five scale. An a priori criteria was applied to down-select a shortlist of the mostcritical and physically demanding tasks (i.e., median task criticality and task physical demand scores of =4, and =3,respectively). A Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis test explored sex and age-based differences in subjective physicaldemand ratings. Results: Ten (out of 25) tasks met the critical-physical demand criteria, which included the four taskcategories of fire fighting, damage control, casualty handling, and basic movement/transit tasks. Casualty handlingemerged as the single most physically demanding task category performed by seafarers, which was rated to have"high" physical demand (4 on the 1 to 5 scale). Sex and age-based differences in subjective ratings of task physicaldemand were equivocal, with females rating 3 (out of the 25 tasks), and 40-51 year olds rating 4 (out of 25 tasks) tohave a higher physical demand than males and 19-29 year olds, respectively. Conclusion: Ten criterion tasks wereidentified and should undergo a further job analysis to inform the development of strength-based PES for the RN.