Broadminded revision for respiratory standard

A respiratory protection standard has been revised to take into account the use of facial piercing and new styles of male facial hair in its guidelines on the facial fit of equipment.

The draft of AS/NZS 1715 " Selection, use and maintenance of respiratory protective equipment, went through a period of public comment late last year and is due for official release between November and December 2006.

Project manager for the Occupational Respiratory Protection Committee at Standards Australia, Olga Pitt told Safety Solutions that the decision to revise the standard was made to address problems of interpretation that have arisen since AS/NZS 1715 was last published in 1994.

"This included the fitting of respiratory protective equipment (RPE) facepieces. We also aimed to provide some guidance for RPE by emergency service personnel for special response HAZMAT incidents," Pitt said.

The text of the document has also been reordered to formally emphasise a risk management and systems management approach.

The major changes include:

• Guidance for RPE used by emergency service personnel for special HAZMAT incidents.
• The use of facial piercing and new styles of male facial hair are taken into account in the section on guidance on facial fit.
• The description of various styles of available RPE have been re-written with new diagrams.
• The appendices covering the use of airline RPE have been simplified and updated.

Wendy Cramer, Editor