Do Your Employees Really Know How To Use Personal Protective Equipment?

Workers have a right to a safe workplace. The law requires employers to provide their employees with safe and healthful workplaces (OSHA 1910.132). The OSHA law also prohibits employers from retaliating against employees for exercising their rights under the law (including the right to raise a health and safety concern or report an injury).

Employers and employees alike often fail to properly assess a work environment for potential and evident hazards. This can lead to incidents ranging from near misses to death. With an appropriate personal protective equipment program that management and employees take responsibility for, the potential for injury on the job can be reduced dramatically.

Personal protective equipment, commonly referred to as “PPE,” is equipment worn to minimize exposure to hazards that cause serious workplace injuries and illnesses. These injuries and illnesses may result from contact with chemical, radiological, physical, electrical, mechanical, or other workplace hazards. Personal protective equipment may include items such as gloves, safety glasses and shoes, earplugs or muffs, hard hats, respirators, or coveralls, vests, and full body suits.

Controlling a hazard at its source is the most effective way to reduce and/or prevent injury. To achieve this, employers and employees should be able to:

■ Understand the types of PPE
■ Know the basics of conducting a “hazard assessment” of the workplace
■ Select appropriate PPE for a variety of circumstances
■ Understand what kind of training is needed in the proper use and care of PPE

What Can Be Done to Ensure Proper Use of Personal Protective Equipment?

All personal protective equipment should be safely designed and constructed, and should be maintained cleanly and reliably. It should fit comfortably, encouraging worker use. If the personal protective equipment does not fit properly, it can make the difference between being safely covered and dangerously exposed.

When engineering, work practice, and administrative controls are not feasible or do not provide sufficient protection, employers must provide personal protective equipment to their workers and ensure its proper use.

Employers are also required to train each worker required to use personal protective equipment to know:

■ When it is necessary
■ What kind is necessary
■ How to properly put it on, adjust, wear, and take it off
■ The limitations of the equipment
■ Proper care, maintenance, useful life, and disposal of the equipment

If PPE is to be used, a PPE program should be implemented. This program should address the hazards present; the selection, maintenance, and use of PPE; the training of employees; and the monitoring of the program to ensure its ongoing effectiveness.

Required Site Assessment: Did You Do Yours?

When we visit our client’s places of employment, we ask to see their site-specific written, dated, and signed PPE assessment, and then ask to talk to the person who was supposed to have conducted it, and they get that glazed look in their eyes. Many employers have generic statements in their safety manuals, but when we ask for each work area’s written assessment, they do not have one.

According to “29 CFR 1910.132 (d)(2) The employer shall verify that the required workplace hazard assessment has been performed through a written certification that identifies the workplace evaluated; the person certifying that the evaluation has been performed; the date(s) of the hazard assessment; and which identifies the document as a certification of hazard assessment.”

Failing to properly train or enforce personal protective equipment is still on OSHA's top ten citations. This is the year 2017. If the employer has a proper safety program, and if they are training the employees and finally enforcing the OSHA standard, they should not worry if OSHA visits them.

Chances are, if we visited your facility and asked the questions, I would bet you a free consultation that many of your managers and employees could not answer the basic question. The question is this: “What American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard do safety glasses have to meet, and then tell me what that standard states?”

If they cannot answer that basic question or if your program does not cover the specific ANSI Z-87 language in that standard, you do not have an effective personal protective equipment program.

Should you have questions concerning your program, please feel free to contact us. We will help you.