Hand injuries are not necessarily something that you would consider daily but stop and consider it for a moment. Or two. How does it affect the people around you? How does it affect the company you work for?
There is only so much that a company can do to enforce safety gloves in a workplace. They can put a strict hand protection policy in place, they can provide their workers with safety gloves free of charge; but when it all boils down, it’s the responsibility of the worker at the end of the day.
How hand injuries impact your personal life
The most basic of everyday tasks become nigh on impossible if you are nursing a major, or even minor, hand injury. For example, imagine trying to do the following with a hand injury:
- Typing
- Tying your shoelaces
- Holding your child’s hand at the crossing
- Doing sport
- Bathing/showering
When you take it into consideration, the consequences start to bear a whole new meaning. The frustration that comes with the inability to undertake such simple everyday tasks is something that also must be remembered. To be irresponsible and opting out of wearing your safety gloves can have a huge knock-on effect on those around you. Being unable to undertake certain tasks yourself means that someone else is going to have to bear that burden instead.
How hand injuries impact your company
Regardless of the severity of the injury, safety managers are going to have to get involved, and health and safety costs will come off the back of this.
- Monetary cost of hand injuries
- Operative downtime
- Treatment
- Litigation
- Insurance
- Safety manager
- HSE costs
The timely and monetary resources that go into the after-effects of a hand injury are just as frustrating for a company as it is for you. Putting it into perspective, fellow employees on a more senior level are going to have to delay or waylay their busy schedules to resolve the extensive issues that arise from a hand injury out in the field. If the injury is more severe, they may have to pay for treatment and operative downtime. In a worst-case scenario, the hand injury could leave a permanent effect on you, to the point that you can no longer do the job that you did before.
How can hand injuries be avoided?
The three colour TraffiSystem is a the most simple and effective way to ensure that you are wearing the right glove for a task you are undertaking. How does the TraffiSystem work? With a huge variety of different coloured safety gloves in the PPE industry, we introduced a revolutionary system, which involved seamless gloves that come in just 3 different colours. What difference does this make? Each colour represents a cut level:
- Red = Cut Level A
- Amber = Cut Level B
- Green = Cut Level C – F
The impact of this is that it ensures that workers need only glance at the colour of a safety glove to see how much cut protection they will be obtaining from that glove. This allows them to be able to determine very easily whether the glove they are using will have protection sufficient for the task they are about to undertake. It also ensures that Health & Safety Advisors can view from a distance whether workers are using the correct level of protection for their tasks.
Whilst this seems a rather pessimistic onslaught, we have some positive news for you! The key takeaway from this is that there is always something you can do. In this case, it’s best to consider prevention rather than cure. The likelihood is that if you have prevention in place, the cure will more often than not, be entirely unnecessary!
