"Hello to you, too," I said. "What can I do for you?"
Jerry explained that he was talking to a group of students, and one said that giving an employee a respirator was the best way to protect them from a chemical hazard. He said he remembered my telling him something about controls and employee protection, but he could not remember what it was. What should he tell the student?
2 comments:
It's good to see an article posted about the hierarchy of controls. Too often we use PPE as the end all be all solution to problems and safety concerns that we might face in the workplace. Yes, PPE have a place in keeping everyone safe in the workplace but as employers and managers we need to also think about controls that can help keep people safe as well. Engineering controls are often not thought about as solutions to dealing with Hazards and should be considered as the next step after eliminating the Hazards. But because they can often be costly and time consuming they are not fully taken into consideration. It is also the job of employers and employees to understand the hazards that they may have to deal with and know of ways and care to find ways to make sure that everyone is safe.
This article brings up some good points that I’ve never really considered before. PPE should always be the last possible solution because it means you’ve hit a point where you can’t make the process any safer in any other way which means that there is inherently risk that you are exposing your employees to. While in some cases the risk is very low that is not always true. There are some chemicals that you can’t replace so you have to expose your workers to that level of risk because there is no alternative. I remember in conservatory hour last year when someone from EH&S came to talk to us about safety and SDS. He said that any time you use any chemical that is dangerous you have to exhaust any alternatives you might have before deciding to use it. These are things we, as employees don’t really think about all that often. Usually we just accept that some processes are more dangerous than others and that there is nothing we can do about it even if there is. It’s up to the employer to make things as safe as possible.
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