Why are safety gloves important?
On average 13,700 workers were injured on the job every day in 2011*. Approximately 20% of these injuries were handling related, so ensuring workers are wearing the correct safety gloves is of the utmost importance and vital for avoiding injury, upholding the correct health and safety regulations and avoiding expensive days off due to injury.
Maintaining a high level of health and safety is essential in all businesses no matter their size. As an employer or business owner, keeping staff and workers safe and healthy is the highest priority to most. Ensuring employees are wearing the correct safety garments are of course a big part of this as businesses hold a legal duty to provide this safety equipment. It is essential that employers know what standards need to be adhered to for their specific industry. It is their responsibility to make sure gloves meeting this standard are provided to their task force that are suitable for that particular handling situation or range of handling situations. This not only ensures the safety of staff - a healthy workforce suffers fewer injury related sick days, as approximately 235 million days of production time were lost due to injuries in 2011*. By adhering to the correct industry safety regulations a business owner upholds the integrity of his or her business, minimises the risk of actions taken against them from the law and also avoids the effects of negative press.
As a worker or employee, similar points of importance must be stressed about wearing the correct safety gloves. Depending on the industry and the handling application, there are hundreds of consequences that can result in the use of improper or not-fit-for-purpose safety garments.
Even a minor cut or hand injury can lead to infection and mean lost workdays, medical expenses and more serious health problems.
Examples of Injuries That Can Be Avoided When Wearing the Correct Safety Gloves
The following injuries can be avoided by selecting the correct safety gloves for the handling application, and ensuring that these safety gloves are worn at the right times:
- Puncture wounds
- Cuts and scrapes
- Heat and chemical burns
- Hazardous substances that can irritate or be absorbed by the skin
- Extreme heat or cold
- Biological agents like bacteria and viruses
- Loss of finger, nail and skin
- Needle stick injuries
Why Choosing the Right Safety Gloves Is Important
If there is one thing more important than ensuring workers are wearing safety gloves, it is ensuring workers are wearing the correct safety gloves for the specific industry and tasks they perform on the job. Wearing the wrong safety gloves won’t protect the wearer from all the potential hazards in their environment. There are some considerations that need to be made when choosing safety gloves. For example, does the wearer need protection from thin sharps like needles or other sharps like nails and screws? By deciphering this information you can assess which glove you’ll need. In this case, the decision to be made is whether you require puncture resistant gloves or needle stick resistant? Other considerations are stated below:
- Handling applications (what will the gloves be used for)
- How employees use their hands when they perform specific tasks
- How much manual dexterity is required for each task
- How great the risk of exposure is for each hand hazard
- How often they are wearing the gloves
- How long they are wearing the gloves
- How to get a good fit
Once you have assessed your needs, simply look through our range of gloves and select the category and type of glove that meets your requirement.
If you are a part of a business with 50 or more glove users and would like an in depth, at work, site assessment to match your handling applications with the correct safety glove, we offer a free service to advise you on the gloves to suit your business’s needs. This can be a granular assessment where we look at each individual workstation or department in your organisation to match up the handling application with the best glove for the job.
Here at SafetyGloves.co.uk we strive to give you the best quality safety glove products sourced from trusted brands from across the world. Our Safety Gloves Experts are on hand to provide helpful advice and information, supplemented by a wealth of safety gloves information on our website.
If you require information or advice about selecting the correct safety gloves for your handling application, please get in touch with our Safety Gloves Team - we are here to help.
(*Sources: National Safety Council ‘Injury Facts’ 2013 edition)