The Occupational Health Nurse Continually Reminds Employees to Wear Their Safety Goggles
Enforcing PPE Use
Make sure employees know that PPE does not eliminate a hazard. If the equipment fails, they will be exposed to hazards.
YOU've conducted a hazard assessment, identified personal protective equipment requirements, and trained your employees, but they don't always wear their PPE. Sooner or later, their failure to use PPE will lead to an injury.
How do you get employees to wear assigned PPE? Your goals to accomplish this include:
- Getting employees to understand the need for PPE and to recognize the control they have over their own safety.
- Getting employees to think about safety every day so they wear assigned PPE.
Eliminating the Need for PPE
First, determine whether you can eliminate the need for PPE through engineering controls, work practices, and administrative controls. If PPE isn't necessary, employees won't need to wear it.
Engineering controls involve physically changing a machine or work environment to prevent exposure to the hazard, such as adding a guard to a machine, building a barrier between employees and the hazard, altering a process, or switching to a non-toxic (less hazardous) material.
Work practices involve training workers to perform tasks in ways that reduce exposure to workplace hazards. Changing the way employees do their jobs is a work practice control, such as wetting an area before sweeping to reduce dust.
Administrative controls involve changing how or when employees do their jobs, such as rotation schedules to reduce exposures.
You should implement all feasible engineering, work practice, and administrative controls to reduce or eliminate hazards before using PPE. When such controls are not feasible or effective, provide appropriate PPE that properly fits the workers, communicate PPE selection decisions, and require workers to use and maintain it in sanitary and reliable condition. However, getting employees to actually wear PPE is often a problem.
Typically, employers address PPE use through training, incentives, and enforcement.
This article originally appeared in the February 2004 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.
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Source: https://ohsonline.com/Articles/2004/02/Enforcing-PPE-Use.aspx
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