Hand Safety, Know the Basics

Here’s your fun fact of the week: hands are the second most common body part to be injured in the workplace. But the thing is, these injuries can be virtually eliminated with some simple safety precautions. Check out 5 quick tips that you can implement in your work place to create a safer environment.
 

1. Conduct Essential Training:

Employees must be trained on proper procedures they should follow to prevent injury. This includes topics like appropriate equipment use, equipment limitations, and correct glove use. Glove training in particular should highlight the things that gloves CAN protect against as well as the things gloves CAN’T protect against.
 

2. Analyze Job Hazards:

This should honestly be one of the very first things you do when you’re revising or implementing a safety procedure. You should complete a job hazard analysis which will help you to efficiently identify areas where risks run high and then take action to minimize the risk in those areas. After you identify the areas, some things you can do to reduce or eliminate the hazard include: installing guards or buffers, modifying machinery, or locating alternate materials.
 

3. Encourage Worker Awareness:

Here’s the thing, when people get in a routine, tasks become “second nature” and often times focus decreases, leaving workers more vulnerable to injury. One, way to help increase worker awareness is by implementing a job rotation, that keeps workers moving around and working on different tasks.
 

4. Employ Proper Hand Protection:

One of the best ways to minimize potential hand injuries is to use cut resistant work gloves. While they cannot totally eliminate the risk of injury, they surely reduce the likelihood. When choosing work gloves for yourself and/or your employees it is imperative that you do research and match the task to the glove. Gloves are constructed with a variety of different features and you need to make sure they’re actually made to protect you against what you need to be protected from.
 

5. Correct Glove Handling:

If you want your gloves to do their job, you need to take good care of them! Train employees to clean and store their gloves adequately and to always replace gloves when they become damaged.