Personal Protective Equipment Training
Workers in every industry face the hazard of being injured.
In many cases, these injuries are serious enough to affect (sometimes permanently) the injured employees’ ability to continue to work. In addition to the costs to the injured workers, there are costs to employers: medical payments, workers’ compensation, lost workdays and supervisory time.
Because of the seriousness of these types of injuries, OSHA updated its Personal Protective Equipment standards to focus on protection for the eyes, face, head, hands and feet.
Workers need to understand and use Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to help them avoid such injuries in the workplace. Providing the proper protection and ensuring its proper use helps provide a safe working environment for everyone.
The OSHA PPE standards were updated effective July 5, 1994, and cover hazards that can occur to the eyes, head, face, hands and feet. The standards do not cover body, respiratory or hearing protection. For additional information on respiratory and hearing protection, see the “Respiratory Protection” and “Hearing Conservation” programs in this series.
The Blueprints for Safety© Personal Protective Equipment Program is designed to provide a step-by-step approach to developing a PPE program for your company. This program will help you analyze and adjust jobs to make them safer and train employees to understand how to work in ways that protect them from injury.
The outcomes of your PPE program will be as follow:
- Identification of the possible eye, face, head, hand and foot hazards in your workplace
- Creation and use of eye, face, head, hand and foot protection practices
- Employees who are trained to know how to protect their eyes, faces, heads, hands and feet
By creating a program for PPE in the workplace, you can help everyone understand the importance of working in ways that reduce the risk of injury, control the costs associated with injuries and increase everyone’s safety.
