Occupational Health & Safety: Workplace hand injuries are a leading cause of lost workdays and emergency room visits around the globe. From minor to life-threatening and everything in between, these injuries can be costly to employers and life-changing for employees.
10 comments:
This article makes great points about how one should take care of themselves in the workplace. Proper tools and etiquette is what really keeps people safe and costs not through the roof ($21,918 per injury!) Being knowledgeable of your workplace, taking the proper precautions, and standardizing the minimum amount of protection necessary are all things that can greatly improve the safety of your hands and keep medical costs low.
This article has some really good advice on the best way to protect your workers. I especially like that it says to involve them in the testing process to determine which gloves are the best, since people are far more likely to use them if they feel like they had a role in the selection. Since every workplace is different, having your workers test out the gloves definitely seems like the most effective and efficient way to determine what the best kinds of gloves would be for the specific work you are doing.
I was unimpressed with one part of the article- just because 70% of hand injuries occur when a person is not wearing gloves, it doesn't mean that all of those injuries would not have happened if those people had been wearing gloves. Clearly it is possible to be hurt even while wearing gloves (30% of people are), and we have absolutely no information on how many of those injuries would have been prevented. Doubtless many of those injuries would have been prevented by gloves, but many of them could be due to other factors, such as crush injuries (even a padded glove won't protect your hand past a certain weight). They cannot prove that 700,000 injuries are due to not wearing gloves based on the 70% statistic, and doing so is misleading and bad reporting. Although the rest of the article is good and seems trustworthy, citing blatantly misleading information like this automatically makes me mistrust the rest of the information in the article.
Safety in the workplace is so important and gets overlooked so easily in so many places. Hands are obviously really vital to everyone. Keeping them safe is just as important as wearing the proper safety glasses. the article is right in saying you need to test out different gloves and use your employees to do the testing. these are the people who will have to do the job in the gloves and they should be comfortable and confident in the protection they have. Of course not all injury is 100% preventable but anything that someone can do to try and keep the injuries to a minimum is worth it.
It almost sounds like the guy that wrote this article thinks that all hand injuries could have been solved with gloves, much less that many injuries would be much with gloves. In our shop, we only really use gloves as heat protection when something is hot from welding or cutting, occasionally to protect from splinters, and for use with chemicals. However, the majority of disabling hand injuries happen from machine or tool injury. Wearing gloves while using a saw could turn a hand injury into a whole body injury. And in general, gloves decrease your dexterity, increasing the likelihood an injury in any situation
Hand safety is really important!!! You have no idea how many times i have hurt my hands using simple tools! Granted some of these injuries are either from me just being stupid or my lack of knowledge about these tools. Either way I had to get a band aid or needed to stop and regroup. Reading this article has made me more aware of hand safety. In the end with hand safety and just shop shop safety in general, I believe that with more knowledge less injuries occur. You never have too much knowledge or experience to not need a refresher on this. I believe it is that important.
The amount of nerve endings that are in our hands and the range of fine motor skills they possess make them the most valuable tool you could have. This article discusses glove use the most of all. Yes, there are an atrocious amount of hand injuries per year. But, like Sarah said, could gloves really have prevented them? It's the steel-toe boot scenario. If I drop something insanely heavy and it crushes the steel toe through my foot, then it happened. If I didn't have the boot, it would have hurt my foot just as bad. Personally, I believe that best prevention is education. Making sure you're aware of all the potential risks in and during a project can lead you in a more safer direction. Ignoring risks are what gets people injured. Education is power!
In reality this article skews the numbers a bit, and their opening statement is actually false. The article states “Workplace hand injuries are a leading cause of lost workdays and emergency room visits around the globe.” However, according the 2012 Nonfatal Occupational Injuries and Illnesses: Cases with days away from work (Case and Demographics – November 2013) published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “in 2012, multiple injuries with fractures was the most severe nature if injuries and illnesses resulting in a median of 21 days away from work to recuperate, followed by fractures and carpal tunnel syndrome with 30 days. Sprains, strains, tears had a rate of 43 cases per 10,000 full-time workers, and a median of 10 days away from work.” In addition, the same report states that “injuries to the shoulder required the most time away from work to recuperate with a median of 24 days. Knee and wrist injuries required a median of 15 days to recuperate.” Injuries to upper extremities led with 34 cases per 10,000 full-time workers, followed by trunk, lower extremities, and back injuries with 28, 25 and 21 cases per 10,000 full-time workers…hand injuries accounted for 14 cases per 10,000 full-time workers.
Now I’m not saying that people shouldn’t protect their hands, or that 14 cases per 10,000 full-time workers isn’t a very large number, but I have found some contradicting facts to the article. Regardless, I don’t fully agree with their testing program suggestion. Aren’t you as an employer subjecting your employees to possible harm by having them test various forms of PPE in order to determine the best type you should provide your employees with? What if you conduct a test with a harsh chemical that compromises a typical latex or vinyl glove and that’s all the employee is wearing and they suffer a chemical burn? Well, now you know that the glove is insufficient, but you’ve also injured someone in the process. I would suggest consulting the MSDS for an materials your shop is working with a deriving your protocol from there. It’s true that a number of accidents are caused by wearing gloves at an inappropriate time and vice versa, but rather than testing that you should consult manufacturers and vendors for best practice recommendations first, in conjunction with the MSDS prior to proceeding.
I learned this lesson the hard way over this summer. After slicing my finger while just moving a shop fan, I tried to bandage it up and continue working, but it just wasn't exactly working out as well as I hoped. My supervisor sent me to the walk in clinic which was the worst experience ever. I also had to keep work to a minimum for the next week. A simple mistake could have been prevented and I could have contributed so much more if it weren't for my own stupidity. Hand safety is just something that we put in the back of our heads so often. After that incident, I got a new pair of gloves to help prevent dumb things again.
Being a fragile and clumsy person I learned quick what it meant to be safe in intense work places. In our careers our bodies are our selling point. you cant work in a shop if you have a hand cast obstructing your space. The article presents new topics and viewpoints that opened my perspective as to how much an injury of such severity could cost both in hospitality and in life. Proper safety precautions should be taught and enforced in locations where the need should even slightly arise. Each worker should have and test out gloves that are most suitable to them. After reading this article, I am more likely planning to wear my own work gloves to each of my next crew calls.
I do find it important when going about a task, and the type of gloves I’m using aren’t the right size for me to complete the task. Far too often I’ve worn gloves that are too big, more than likely it’s because they were convenient, and I knew I needed some protection. More often than naught those gloves would come off soon after, and I’d be in the same dilemma I just was, because now I’m not wearing gloves. Although I do think people have enough common sense to know what gloves one should use to accommodate the circumstances. I mean would you really bring work gloves to clean, and would you really bring latex gloves to shovel dirt. I think the majority of people have an understanding as to certain gloves pertaining to certain circumstances, it’s just once you’ve honed down a particular stance that you’ve got to go a bit more in depth as to heat resistant or water-proof, hopefully not everyone is oblivious.
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