Hands are one of the most frequently injured parts of the body. Every year, over 100,000 people suffer a lost-time hand injury, and almost 1% of people hurt their hands on an annual basis. This makes hand safety a perennial challenge in many workplaces. And despite the clear need to reduce the severity and frequency of hand-related incidents, it can be hard for safety professionals to get a solid grip on hand safety.
According to a recent article in Occupational Health and Safety titled “Why Hand Safety Remains One of the Toughest Challenges at Work”, the reason that hand injuries are so prevalent may be because EHS folks are overlooking a couple of major contributors to the issue.
One of the most prevalent misconceptions about hand safety is to overweight the value of giving workers gloves. Because while hand protection is important, there’s a lot more to it than simply handing over a few pairs of PPE.
As the article’s author, Ray Prest, points out, “simply providing PPE isn’t sufficient […] one survey reported that 83 percent of respondents said hand injuries occurred in their workplace despite workers being given safety gloves.” In part, this is because you can’t expect people to start using safety gloves as required without instruction, and every piece of protective equipment should be accompanied with training about how, why and when to use it.
More broadly, however, the presence of gloves in the workplace is only part of the issue. People take off their gloves, or forgo wearing them entirely, in all sorts of situations and for all sorts of reasons. And all too often, people work with their bare hands even when they know they should be wearing hand protection. The reason why? Human factors.
Complacency can lead workers to believe they don’t need to wear their gloves. Distraction or fatigue can cause employees to forget to put on hand protection after their lunch break. Rushing can make it seem like a waste of time to fetch PPE from a locker or truck.
In the OHS article, Prest points out that human factors contribute to hand injuries in other ways too. Distractions can mean employees inadvertently place a hand in the line of fire, and ambiguity can mean workers aren’t sure when they actually have to wear safety gloves. And while human factors often contribute to small errors, these little mistakes can be enough to damage the fragile bones in the human hand.
The article goes on to propose several solutions, the first of which is getting frontline leaders to lend a helping hand. A safety-conscious supervisor can reduce hand injuries in a number of ways with the judicious use of communication skills, just-in-time interventions, and effective reminders about the importance of personal safety awareness and managing human factors.
Of course, as Prest notes, there’s no benefit in having supervisors remind people about rushing or fatigue if employees don’t have a basic understanding of human factors to begin with. That’s why the article goes on to suggest that a good human factors training initiative is foundational to a comprehensive hand safety program:
“Distraction, fatigue and rushing all contribute to hand incidents. One effective mitigation strategy is to educate workers on human factors and to give them the practical skills to identify and manage them in real time. A good human factors training program can provide context to help improve systems, [and] it should also include a healthy dose of habit-building.”
Human factors training can bolster both active awareness and ever-present habits. And the two layers of defense are necessary. Workers often need a high degree of personal safety awareness to recognize when their hands might be at risk—and they also need good safety habits that protect them when there are lapses in their personal awareness.
In the end, the article demonstrates that there is no single solution to hand injuries. Instead, a web of solutions that stretches from PPE to human factors management can provide a high degree of protection for people’s hands in the workplace. As for where to start on weaving that web, the article and SafeStart’s free hand safety guide offer practical insights and strategies for keeping people’s hands safe.