Page 30 - OHS, March 2020

HAND PROTECTION
Cutting to the Chase in Hand Protection
How should you decide which gloves will best protect your workers from cut and puncture hazards?
BY LYDIA BAUGH
Travis Watson watched as a rigger checked a cable for frayed wires. The worker was wearing a coated fabric glove that had what was then considered a high puncture- protection rating. But suddenly, as the worker slid his hand along the cable, a piece of wire went right through the glove and laid open a large portion of the worker’s palm.
Witnessing that tragedy several years back launched Watson into a quest for better hand safety that continues to this day, in his role as subcontrac- tor safety programs manager at UCOR LLC in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
“That incident took everybody by surprise,” Wat- son said. “In reality, it turned out that particular glove offered almost no puncture protection. So, that led us into a journey to understand ratings and how the rat- ings are determined.”
A quick look at injury stats shows why it’s vital to make hand protection an integral part of work- place safety culture. More than 43 percent of nonfa- tal occupational injuries to upper extremities in 2018 involving days away from work in private industry involved hands, according to the U.S. Bureau of La- bor Statistics. Plus, a hand injury can cost from $540 to $26,000, according to the National Safety Council. Think about lost productivity, workers comp and li- ability insurance costs.
OSHA reports that 71 percent of hand and arm injuries could have been prevented with personal pro- tective equipment, specifically safety gloves. Yet, 70 percent of workers don’t wear hand protection. And of those who do, 30 percent don’t wear the right kind of glove for the task. Making the right procurement choices—and making hand safety a top priority—can help drive those numbers down.
Updated Standards
Julianne Gietzen, director of product management at HexArmor in Grand Rapids, Mich., notes that there’s still some confusion among company safety managers about the industry standards governing safety gloves because both domestic and international standards have evolved over time.
In 2016, the International Safety Equipment As- sociation (ISEA) updated ANSI/ISEA 105-2011 with a new approach to defining a glove’s level of cut resis- tance. While ANSI/ISEA 105-2011 used a scale of one to five to indicate a glove’s cut resistance rating, ANSI/
ISEA 105-2016 replaced that scale with nine levels, defined as A1 through A9. Generally speaking, those nine levels can be thought of in three groupings:
Levels A1, A2 and A3 offer protection against scrapes.
■ Levels A4, A5 and A6 offer protection against injuries for which stitches would be required.
■ Levels A7, A8 and A9 offer protection against the most serious injuries.
To address needle-stick hazards, ANSI/ISEA 105- 2016 also incorporated ASTM F2878, Standard Test Method for Protective Clothing Material Resistance to Hypodermic Needle Puncture.
Watson says the 2016 transition to the new ratings was hard for some people to grasp but led to a supe- rior approach.
There is no one-size-fits-all answer to the ques- tion: What should we get for our workers? Every glove manufacturer and distributor has its own ap- proach to working with end users on determining which glove provides the best solution for a specific hazard present in a particular workplace. Generally, the best companies use a consultative and collabora- tive approach for determining the best mix of hand- protection solutions.
“We take a holistic approach to save the customer money,” said Keith Henderson, national accounts manager at Bob Dale Gloves in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. “We really believe in protecting people, so we invest the time and effort to make sure the right solu- tion is brought to the table.”
Henderson adds that each company has its own pain points as well as top desired benefits when searching for hand-protection solutions. Sometimes the safety director will be looking to reduce costs while streamlining hand-protection effectiveness.
“Safety managers in a company with a good safety culture work with their end users to make sure a prod- uct will be a good fit and actually be worn,” Gietzen said. “They don’t want to buy something the workers aren’t going to wear. They also need to understand the difference between a performance glove and a com- modity glove.”
Prevention is actually the most important step to start with, said Mike Myrick, product manager at Collierville, Tennessee-based MCR Safety. “Engineer out the hazard and have proper training,” Myrick said. “An unguarded machine creates a safety hazard.”
He adds that there’s no such thing as a completely
24 Occupational Health & Safety | MARCH 2020
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