Occupational Health & Safety: The best reason to maintain a top-of-the-line PPE program, including employees' critical eye and face protection, is to prevent a life-changing injury. Eye injuries can range from mild—minor bumps and scratches—to serious, eyesight-threatening injuries that demand immediate medical attention.
Common injuries include corneal abrasions, which are scratches on the clear, front surface of the eye. They can result from merely rubbing your eye or from wearing contacts too long, or from a speck of "something" in the eye or being poked in the eye by some object.
2 comments:
Eye protection is probably the safety concern I am the most hypocritical about because I am rarely ever prepared for eye-endangering activities and dislike wearing my safety glasses even when doing mundane shop tasks that aren’t inherently dangerous to my eyes. I was completely blown away by the statistic that over 2,000 eye injuries of varying severity occur every day. While I’m not super surprised by that, as I tend to get something in my eye roughly eight times a day, I guess I’m more surprised by the amount of injuries reported. I am also happy to see that ANSI is working hard to make eyewash stations available and comprehensive for all consumers and companies. I really think severity of injury would go down if everyone carried their own saline solution, like myself and many contact wearers do. I always have a contact case and saline on me in case of disruption because going without contacts is literally impossible and I would be unable to complete my job if I were to go without them.
As Norm always says “there is no more important safety rule than to wear these, safety glasses”. In most every industry every practitioner has different ways of doing things or different ideas about what the safest way to do something is, but I do not think anyone would say it is safer to not wear safety glasses/goggles than it is to wear them. Do safety glasses prevent all injury? Of course not. Will dust particles stay away from your eyes because you are wearing glasses? Nope. But things flying at you, wood chips, metal shards, so many other hazards are all protected by eye protection. I do appreciate how this article details how to deal with getting something in your eye. I also appreciate and don’t appreciate the “Learn From Others’ Mistakes” section. I think it is import to show people cases when injuries we sustained, but I think the article could have done more to illustrate how bad an eye injury can be for the person who has the injury.
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