Is Your Personal Protective Equipment Easy to Find?
When it comes to providing your workers with personal protective equipment – PPE for short – how you store safety devices is important
Consider this example - your employees need to quickly grab the safety glasses they’re required to wear but can’t find them. Every day thereafter, they continue to ignore the required PPE and walk right into a danger zone because it’s too much of a hassle to find a pair of safety glasses.
PPE is designed to reduce the risk of injury and is suitable for many jobs including, construction, manufacturing, roofing, utility work, and welding.
If PPE is enforced but the storage space is too unorganized and isn’t maintained properly, workers are not protected from hazardous environments.
Per OSHA, when you cannot engineer, administratively eliminate, or guard against a hazard, PPE is the only thing between you and serious injury. PPE is equipment worn to minimize exposure to hazards that cause serious workplace injuries and illnesses.
Here are a few housekeeping tips to help you keep your PPE organized
- Post and display a visual chart identifying Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) required to be worn by employees, contractors and visitors in your facility!
- Clean PPE according to the manufacturer’s instructions good condition.
- Inspect the PPE for wear and tear and ensure they’re maintained and damaged free so they can continue to protect your workers.
- If PPE is broken, take it out of inventory and replace it right away.
- Store your PPE where you use it!
Here’s a checklist for training employees to use and care for eye and face protection, as noted on OSHA’s website. For a complete list of items, please visit this link.
Checklist for training employees to use and care for eye and face protection:
- Why eye protection is necessary, i.e., the workplace hazards that threaten their eyes
- How the eye protection will protect them
- The limitations of eye protection
- When they must wear the eye protectors
- How to put the protective eyewear on properly
- How to adjust straps and other parts for comfortable and effective fit
- How the protective eyewear fits over or contains an employee’s corrective fit.
- How to identify signs of wear such as:
- Chipped, scratched, or scraped lenses
- Loss of elasticity or fraying of head bands
- How to clean and disinfect the safety eyewear.
To view some products that can help you achieve an organized PPE space, we invite you to browse here.
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