Worker safety at risk due to compliance issues

Personal protective equipment (PPE) may be the last resort for controlling workplace health and safety risks. However, a number of workplace injuries and subsequent claims can be avoided by wearing the right PPE.

Worker safety is at risk because compliance with the Australian Standards for industrial safety gloves is not consistent, warns the newly formed industry group Working for a Safer Australia (WSA) - The Glove Standards Compliance Group. Australia’s hand protection standards are based on the European EN standards with one exception - independent testing is not mandatory.

Work-related hand and wrist injuries result in around 8400 hospital admissions a year in Australia, according to Safe Work Australia’s 2008 report.

The WSA group, which includes Uvex, Ansell, Performance on Hand, SafetyMate and Showa Best, is preparing an evidence-based submission to Standards Australia to correct a deficiency in the Australian Standards regime for industrial gloves.

The group believes that not only must independent testing be introduced, but that it should also be accompanied by improved compliance across the industrial sector via the development of a national glove database, a personal protection equipment (PPE) certification training program and, if necessary, the upgrading of federal workplace safety legislation.

“There is no doubt that the absence of independent EN testing as a mandatory component of the Australian/New Zealand Standards (AS/NZS) is exposing workers to risks,” said Mitchell Mackey, Head of Marketing, Industrial and New Verticals - Asia Pacific, Ansell Healthcare.

Standards compliance is not consistent and worker safety is at risk as a result, Mackey said, adding that self-certification is not reliable and definitely not in the best interests of people who daily place their hands at risk by exposure to sharp-edged objects, chemicals and abrasives.

In Australia, around 16,700 cases of work-related hand and wrist injury resulted in hospital admission in the two-year period covered (2002-2003 and 2003-2004) by the Safe Work Australia study - Work-related hand and wrist injuries in Australia. “Work-related hand and wrist injuries comprised 32% of all work-related injury admissions over that period,” states the report.

In Victoria, there were 12,491 emergency department presentations for work-related hand and wrist injury over the two-year study period. This represented 32.7% of the 38,210 work-related presentations to emergency departments in Victoria over the same period. As against this, in Queensland, there were 3351 presentations to emergency departments due to work-related hand and wrist injury. These represented 44% of the 7552 work-related cases of injury that presented to the involved emergency departments over the same period. There were 13,830 accepted serious claims for hand and wrist injuries in the workers compensation data provided by Queensland, South Australia and Tasmania.

Many injuries occur because workers still don’t wear gloves, and of those who do, some don’t wear the type of glove required for the job, says Damione Wright, founder and Managing Director, Performance On Hand - a designer, manufacturer and distributor of high-performance work gloves. Wright founded Performance On Hand in 2005 with an aim to improve productivity and safety by providing gloves based on the type of duties the workers are expected to do.

The manufacturing industry, wholesale and retail trade industry, and the construction industry appear to be the industries where workers most commonly sustain hand and wrist injuries in the course of work, according to the Safe Work Australia 2008 Work-related hand and wrist injuries report. “This is probably due to the tasks being undertaken and the equipment being used which has the potential to exert large forces directly or indirectly to the hand and wrist. Guarding was a problem in a considerable minority of the injuries, as was locking or jamming power tools. This suggests there are design issues that could usefully form a focus of preventative activity,” states the report.

The industrial and construction areas (38%) such as factories and construction sites, and trade and service areas (12%) such as eating places and commercial garages, were the main places of occurrence for the hand and wrist injuries resulting in hospital admission, according to the report. As against this, for emergency department presentations, “the majority of incidents occurred in trade and service areas (54%), with a fifth occurring at industrial and construction areas”.

The absence of independent testing has created a situation where workers cannot be confident about the EN performance rating claims of many safety gloves, said Wright. He favours the development of a system similar to the water efficiency WELS standard, which would mean gloves would be registered, rated and labelled according the requirements of the applicable standard.

“This would give people making glove choices the critical data they need,” Wright said.

“In a similar fashion to the WELS database, gloves could be cross-referenced to the performance requirements of relevant product standards and technical specifications. All registered products could be searched for on the database. By simply going to ‘select all’, if a glove did not appear, a purchaser could ask further questions regarding issues such as independent testing.”

The current Australian glove safety standards aren’t sufficient in guiding appropriate use of gloves, said Wright. The issue of compliance needs to be addressed first and once improvement in compliance is achieved, the glove safety standards need to be looked at and improved, he added. Standards are necessary to help people to be informed about safety issues - they should help customers make informed decisions, he said.

Peter Lockerbie of Showa Best is another proponent of independent safety certification. “At present, we have safety gloves from all over the world coming into Australia which bear the EN ratings; however, unless these gloves have been independently tested, as required by the EN standards, how can a person responsible for ensuring workers’ safety be confident that these gloves will protect the workers for the purpose for which they are intended?,” Lockerbie said.

As independent testing is not mandatory, we are seeing substandard products in the market, says Lockerbie. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that all the products that are not independently tested are bad. It is important to educate the end user to reduce injuries and improve workplace safety.

Mitchell Mackey of Ansell said the major hand protection suppliers carry out independent laboratory testing to ensure their products provide the claimed protection levels.

“Our group will be working proactively with the National Safety Council of Australia and Standards Australia to address these glove standards issues.”

Clint Tee of Safety Mate, a wholesaler for ATG gloves, said, “Safety Mate believes that, as a starting point, all glove manufacturers and importers should have their gloves tested to accredited, independent laboratories to substantiate any protection level claims made. Currently, this is not regulated and customers are accepting the glove’s depicted protection levels as having been legitimately verified. Our concern is that the customer may not be getting the protection they believe they have on their hands (and need to avoid and reduce injuries). Testing by accredited, independent laboratories will give the customer this assurance.”

Damione Wright, Performance On Hand, also stressed the importance of wearing the right fitting gloves. His company has developed a wide range of sizes to ensure that workers get the right fit.

To ensure that gloves have a perfect fit and also provide the highest possible level of safety at work, scientists from the Hohenstein Institute, an international research and service centre based in Boennigheim, Germany, are currently creating a database with actual hand measurements. The Hohenstein scientists have used 3D scanner technology to develop a hand database. An initial pilot study measured the hands of 100 male test-persons. The 3D data capture enabled 48 longitudinal and circumference measurements for each hand to be recorded and analysed quickly and accurately, according to the institute. “Using state-of-the-art 3D scanners, detailed and accurate virtual hand models and hand measurement tables are being created which can be used by glove manufacturers to create customised ergonomic gloves. The actual market shares of the different sizes, which have been extrapolated from the measurement data, provide an additional tool for optimum market coverage.

“In addition to the capture of hand dimensions, the innovative digital method enables the generation of ‘average size hands’ to be determined. This is achieved by consolidating all hands which should fit a particular glove size in an elaborate method using specialised 3D software. The results are virtual 3D mouldings which both represent a glove size in its measurable dimensions and also in its three-dimensional form.” The Hohenstein Institute is still seeking interested industry partners who would like to use the results of the hand measurements and the resulting generated data for their product development and optimisation of current product ranges.