Safety Article : Personal Protective Equipment : Hand Gloves

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 Safety Article

Personal Protective Equipment: Hand Gloves

When considering risks at workplace, non-compliance like non usage of hand gloves is among the most common and dangerous. Too many workers either don't wear gloves or wear the wrong gloves for the job, Understanding Non-Compliance Let's take a step back—just how dangerous is non-compliance?

         

                 

                                                       

Every moment a worker's hands are exposed, they are at risk. There are some two dozen bones in each hand, along with muscles, tendons, ligaments, arteries, veins and nerves—simply put, a lot can go wrong, and it can be serious. 

Too many workers either don't wear gloves or wear the wrong gloves for the job, and there are three common reasons: 

1. Comfort, or more accurately, discomfort; 
2. Poor performance
• the gloves don't provide the grip or dexterity needed to do the job well
3. Ingrained habits.

According to the Statistics, more than one million workers go to the emergency room with hand injuries each year, and large number of hand injuries result in lost time. The average hand injury results number off work days, the hands incur all industrial injuries, and cuts, in particular, can be costly—hitting employers with an high financial impact. 

These are powerful disincentives. Whether it's an uncomfortable chair or a pair of shoes that doesn't fit quite right, discomfort leads to change—new shoes, a different chair or, more relevant to this discussion, removing or choosing a different pair of gloves. Now imagine trying to work with tiny nuts and bolts while wearing thick, stiff gloves. Even if those gloves protect the hands from cuts, mounting frustration from dropped bolts could eventually lead even the most safety-conscious workers to doff their gloves in exasperation.

And then there's habit—a time when our mind downshifts, doing actions unconsciously. This can be a dangerous practice, especially at workenvironments :-

• How many serious accidents have been the results of workers mindlessly repeating tasks? 
• How ingrained are habits related to hand protection?

This all matters because workers make these sorts of choices every day. 

• They decide either to wear gloves or remove gloves for some reason or another. 
• Their comfort zone when it comes to PPE is formed over time and determined by familiarity and habit as much as objective data around performance and safety. 
• To drive meaningful changes in behavior and decrease non-compliance—not only must better gloves be provided. 
• Workers and gatekeepers who manage PPE selection or wear gloves need education concerning worker habits and the triggers behind non-compliance.

Workers may wear gloves for carrying large pieces of equipment or materials, then remove them without thinking to pick up tools or hardware. That's a holdover behavior from a time when bulky work gloves made more precise movements difficult or impossible. It's not unusual to see workers remove gloves to sign invoices or tracking documents or to check their phones, and all of those behaviors can become habitual.

Therefore, across the globe, it's in the employer's interest to carry out evaluations and determine which hand protection solutions are most appropriate for their need—taking a proactive step in eliminating the challenge factors that cause workers to habitually remove gloves in the first place. Then, employers and manufacturers can help by providing data from the various test methods to help with glove selection, and education concerning PPE compliance and habits to take proactive steps to go past simply providing the glove and instead taking actionable steps to combat poor habits and non-compliance. As such, both employers and manufactures are supporting the important focus on worker safety.

👀  We Stand & Where We Go Next

Employer / Organization need to focus on behavioral changes of employees , so this is a positive step toward improved compliance, better gloves are only part of the solution. 

To break bad habits, employers must identify and focus on keystone habits, uncovering the cues that lead workers to remove their gloves, and where possible, instilling practices that encourage higher levels of compliance.

If we are going to truly redefine the comfort zone of worker, it will require technological advances to gloves along with improved education around safety practices and a far more thoughtful, proactive approach to changing behavior and breaking counterproductive habits.