Personal Protective Equipment and Their Use

Posted by helenan on April 29th, 2021

While personal protective equipment has been here for long, its usage has increased in recent times because of COVID-19 pandemic.

Usually, PPE or personal protective equipment is designed to protect workers from infections, workplace injuries or illness that may occur due to contact with chemicals, infected persons and other factors such as electrical, radiological, and physical workplace hazards. PPE includes face shields, safety shoes, hard hats, and a variety of devices and garments such as gloves, vests, goggles, respirators, earplugs, etc.

Industries have their own PPE requirements, depending on the kind of materials they handle and operations they manage. Proper usage of adequate PPE is essential to ensure complete safety in the workplace. Employers must investigate workplace hazards and make efforts to do away with them completely. In order to ensure safety, employees must also comply with workplace policies concerning PPE and report any problems with the equipment in use to the employer. Failure to wear proper safety equipment while doing the job can be harmful for the employees. Compliance with PPE protocols is the main concern regarding injury prevention program.

Proper PPE selection

Employers must conduct a hazard assessment to determine the level of hazards and choose what PPE is the best for those hazards. Based on that, they have to train and require workers to put on their safety gear and keep the PPE well maintained in sanitary and reliable conditions. PPE is definitely important to maintain safety in the workplace, but adequate safety may not be ensured if one ignores factors such as:

• Proper selection of PPE
• Worn or ill-maintained PPE
• Failure of PPE

Requiring the use of PPE alone is not sufficient as it may expose workers to unmitigated hazards.  It’s important to keep in mind all other factors to ensure safety.

PPE for healthcare and frontline workers

The use of PPE has gained immense prominence during the COVID-19 era when medical experts and frontline workers had to come in direct contact with Coronavirus patients. Proper use of PPE as per the guidelines issued by WHO has become essential to avoid contracting the virus while handling patients. The use of PPE by hospitals staff, doctors, workers, cleaning experts, as well as other frontline workers like police and all other coming in direct contact with an infected person is extremely important. PPE must be worn by individuals whose job requires them to come in contact with infected people.