Why Relying on PPE as Primary Protection is Hurting your Safety Performance

Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of The Safety First Journal.

Many managers and business owners treat Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) as the worker’s first line of defense. It seems reasonable after all, PPE is designed to protect workers against hazards. But relying on PPE as primary protection is actually counterproductive to keeping people safe and could be hurting your company’s safety performance.

The Mistake

Imagine a scenario where an industrial worker gets ready for the day by putting on his hard hat, safety glasses, work boots, gloves and hi-vis vest and then walks straight into a work area that is poorly lit, disorganized, full of tripping hazards and forklift traffic. Is that worker safe because they put on their safety glasses? Of course not.

Yet this is the mistake that businesses across the country make on a daily basis. They provide and mandate PPE, as they should, but then they assume that workers are safe from injury just because they are using it. They treat PPE as the primary method of protection instead of as a backup.

Now, I’m certainly not arguing against the practice of providing workers with PPE and mandating its use. In many cases it’s absolutely necessary and the right thing to do. The problem comes when you provide PPE and then assume it will do the job of keeping workers safe without looking at the underlying hazards that cause the PPE to be required in the first place.

Why it Happens

Why is it so tempting to simply rely on PPE to do its job? Here are a few reasons:

· Visibility. It’s easy to spot when a worker is wearing PPE, and therefore easy to enforce. If a worker puts their safety glasses on their forehead or takes their hard hat off, you can see it and correct it immediately. On the other hand, a worker in full PPE certainly safe and it’s easy to assume they are.

· Expediency. Mandating PPE is easy to do and checks the box of providing safety equipment. And it’s certainly not wrong, the problem comes when you use it as a substitute for looking deeper at the hazards in your workplace.

· Cultural factors. Workers and managers alike may see gearing up in PPE as being protected against anything that can happen.

The Fix – Reframing PPE as a Backup

While this might seem a bit counterintuitive, PPE should actually be your last line of defense, not the first. The best approach is to fix the underlying issues in your workplace, then provide PPE as a last resort.

How do you do this? Let’s look at what is known as the Hierarchy of Hazard Controls. There are 5 general ways to protect workers from hazards, and I’ll list them in order of effectiveness.

1. Elimination. Elimination means removing a hazard from the workplace altogether. For example, changing a process so that a dangerous machine no longer be used or a heavy lift is no longer required.

2. Substitution. This is most common when using chemicals in a manufacturing process. If you’re using a chemical that is carcinogenic or creates dangerous fumes, can you substitute a difference chemical that does the same thing without the dangerous side effects, or one with less dangerous side effects?

3. Engineering controls. Can you put a guard or a barrier between the worker and the hazard? What about options like a dust extraction system to remove or reduce respiratory hazards?

4. Administrative Controls. These controls include administrative tasks such as pre-start checklists to identify hazards before work begins or employee training on how to work safely and handle hazards that may arise in the course of the workday.

5. PPE. Finally, PPE is the least effective of hazard controls. Why the least effective? Because PPE does nothing to change or reduce the hazard. All it does is provide some level of protection if the hazard does occur. For example, it’s much better to prevent hand injuries when operating a table saw by adding a guard on the saw blade than to provide a glove to protect the hand in case it gets caught.

How to Implement

If your company relies on PPE as a first line of defense, it will take some time to change the mindset, but here’s how you start to shift things in the right direction:

· Train your managers, safety committee and workers on the hierarchy of hazard controls. This approach may be new to those without a safety background, but it is fundamental knowledge for those charged with keeping workers safe.

· Update risk assessments in your workplace to identify opportunities for higher level controls.

· Involve workers in hazard reduction initiatives with this framework in mind and look for ways to controls hazards at the source, rather than relying on PPE to do the work.

The key win here is to shift the mindset of your managers, workers and safety committee to dig deeper on possible ways to keep workers safe, rather than handing out PPE and assuming the job is done.

That’s it for this week, if you’d like more on the subject, check out:

CCOHS: Hazard and Risk - Hierarchy of Controls

Identifying Hazard Control Options: The Hierarchy of Controls

The Safety First Journal is published weekly on Tuesday mornings (because no one needs more stuff to read on a Monday 😊) on LinkedIn and Substack.

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Cheers,

Dan.