Rapid Upper Limb AssessmentRULA

The Rapid Upper Limb Assessment — RULA — is the ergonomic screening tool that scores the posture of the upper body at a workstation and flags the musculoskeletal risk before it becomes the reportable disorder. The assessor observes the worker, scores the upper arm, the forearm, the wrist, the neck, the trunk, and the legs on a posture scale, adjusts for the muscle use and the force, and combines the scores into a single 1-to-7 action level — 1 and 2 acceptable, 3 and 4 investigate and change, 5 and 6 investigate soon, 7 investigate immediately. RULA is the fast tool an ergonomist runs in minutes, and it is the one a line supervisor can be trained to run on every new workstation.

RULA is the upper-body tool, and it is the right tool for the workstation where the risk is in the arms and the hands — the assembly cell, the laboratory bench, the office desk, the surgical theatre. It is not the right tool for the whole-body lifting task — the patient transfer, the bag lift, the construction handling — where the Rapid Entire Body Assessment, REBA, is the method that scores the lower body and the load. The two are paired, not competing, and a musculoskeletal programme that runs RULA on the seated tasks and REBA on the lifting tasks covers the two risk populations the office and the floor both carry. The honest use is the repeat assessment after the intervention, to prove the score moved. See REBA and leading indicator.