Safety Gloves and Hand Protection at Work – It’s important

An injury to your hand while at work is one of the most common types of injury at the workplace. Such injuries are even more prominent in the electric, construction and gas industries. Meanwhile, a study published by the National Safety Council (NSC) states – injuries to the hands comprised 16.5% when consolidated workplace injuries in 2010. Also, an average hand injury costs around $3500 which does not even include the lost work days or the loss in production for the company. However, Mechanix gloves can help in avoiding injuries to your hands and keep them safe.

When workers are operating heavy objects, chemicals, moving components, electricity, and enormous machines, their hands are often exposed to terribly harsh conditions in addition to the risk of injury. The foremost unfortunate a part of this is often the very fact that just about all hand injuries that occur during a given year could’ve been prevented, had the employees been using the apt hand protection.

Every place of work and job sites must have apt hand safety programs. It must consist of risk analysis, danger awareness training, assessment, and intermittent assessments of the program as well as all workers. If you have a good hand safety program in place, not only will your work site become much secure for the staff, but they will have much greater assurance, and thus greater productivity. Because, they know that their company is taking the necessary measures to safeguard them.

Here, we will give you a basic rundown of what a hand safety program must comprise of. We will also point out situations need hand protection, and the suitable type of protection to wear in each given situation.

When working in an industrial setup, personal protective equipment is an absolute must. Therefore, for tasks that require additional hand protection, work gloves must be utilized. Such jobs usually encompass:

·         Climbing poles or ladders. 

·         Handling any type of tools, materials, or equipment that has sharp, jagged, or splintered edges.

·         Projects that involve heat or chemicals could lead to heat or chemical burns. This could involve handling molten solder or compounds.

·         Executing any tasks that could lead to cuts, burns, or abrasions to the hands.

It is also vital to be aware if you are working with hefty equipment, or any type of machinery with moving parts. Your gloves could get caught and lead to disastrous consequences while working.

Also, one of the most important, yet most overlooked, parts of wearing hand protection is right size of the glove. Bigger gloves will affect the worker’s gripping ability and agility. However, if the glove is too small, then the hands will exhaust easily and the glove will wear out earlier than usual. Make sure your glove fits just perfectly! You must make sure that you are wearing the correct size glove for the given task or situation. Manual workers must be aware of the following things when choosing which type of glove they will be using:

·         Grip 

·         Flexibility and agility

·         Resistance to abrasions, punctures, and tears.

·         Comfort

·         Chemical permeability

·         Thermal conditions, heat, and cold

·         High and low voltage

There are precise conditions in which wearing gloves would not be apt since they would affect the fresh application of some types of materials. If you are at work in one of these situations, you will still want to make sure that you are wearing the correct type of hand protection if you are working on a de-energized conductor. The situations we are speaking of include:

·         Working with waterproofing materials

·         Working with stress relief materials

·         Fitting tapes including varnished cambric oil tapes and vinyl tapes

·         Working with mastics or Hi-K putty

·         Locating oil-insulated papers or insulation of cables

·         Pre-insulating paper and lead splices

·         Cleaning cable insulation

·         Curbed areas like the junction of a three-conductor splice

·         Cleaning cable insulation

Therefore, it goes without saying that our hands are the most important tools you will ever work with. We are graced with only two and we use them in almost literally every facet of life, inside as well as outside of the workplace. Don’t be thoughtless and injure or lose them simply because you are being ignorant about hand safety. Use proper hand protection and keep your hands working and productive for a lifetime.