Safety should be in the learning syllabus

In the city I live, in and around every factory and construction site I visited, I saw the most common sign “SAFETY FIRST” displayed in the most prominent locations such as the main entrance. In the sign there are also pictures and wordings showing mandatory requirement of wearing safety shoes, safety glasses, safety helmet etc in the premises.

How many, however, are really putting SAFETY FIRST in their works? In the construction sites, unfortunately, many of them do not.  Many workers do not wear safety shoes (perhaps except the engineers and may be the supervisors).

It is also not uncommon seeing workers working at height do not wear safety harness for fall protection.  Many of them do wear safety helmet, nowadays, but I believe most of them do not wear them properly according to safety standard. Do you know that the helmet will not give you maximum protection if you do not wear them properly? And do you know how to wear your safety helmet safely?

Recently, I visited a local educational institute.  In a practical class, students were learning using drilling and cutting machines.  You know what?  Only one of them was wearing safety glasses.  At first I thought may be safety glasses were not given to them. But then I saw a box at the center of the table.  In the box there are the safety glasses.

Later on, I found out from the class-in-charge that safety glasses was given to all of them and safety briefing was in fact given to all the students, by the lecturer, when they came to attend the first practical class.

Why then that the students were not wearing the safety glasses when they were using the drilling and cutting machines?

Knowing the problem, the class-in-charge took the box and asked the students to put on the safety glasses.  Some did as they are told but still many did not follow the instruction.

As far as safety is concerned, especially for the students who enrolled to the course learning how to use drilling and cutting machines, for example, safety must be emphasized in the first place.  The students should be all wearing the safety glasses before they were allowed to handle or to move near to see the demonstrations.

As most of the students were still not wearing the safety glasses even after the class-in-charge took the box and asked them to put them on.  I doubted the effectiveness of the safety briefing given to the students when they attended the first class.

I do not think that the students should be blamed for not wearing the safety glasses in this case.

After some discussion with the officer who was in charge of the safety of the practical classes, I was asked for my opinions on how to improve the safety standards of the class.

First I told them it is not at all difficult to impose safety regulations or rules to the students.  They should be taught not only the skills they need for their future careers but the safety aspects too.  At this point, I strongly recommended that safety should be included to the learning syllabus.

I recommended that a safety program should be written and implemented.  The program should at least include:

1. The name of the program, for example, “Eye protection program for practical Lab Class”.
2. Purpose of the program
3. The program administrator – who shall run the program
4. Identification and risk assessment of hazards
5. Engineering and structural controls
6. Existing safety procedures, if any
7. Additional safety procedures needed, if any
8. Selection of PPE – criteria of selection, market survey, potential suppliers.
9. Training –  Selection, use of PPE, maintenance etc,
10. Maintenance and house keeping
11. Motivation – how to answer and entertain complains
12. Record keeping and monitoring of the program

After running the program, every one concerned will know exactly what they should know and should do when they attend the class.  When the students came for the class, they will receive a pair of safety glasses in a clean and good working condition. (Wearing a pair of glasses with scratches and stains will impair visions and cause accident.) An officer-in-charge shall be there to give each student the glasses when they enter the classroom..

There should be a safety glasses cleaning and maintenance program too that includes:

1. After each class, the safety glasses should be returned for checking and cleaning.
2. Damaged glasses should be discarded and replaced.
3. Cleaning procedure and anti-fog application
4. The safety glasses after cleaning should be kept in box or cabinet away from dust and chemicals.

More than one model or sizes of safety glasses may be made available to provide best facial fitting to the students for maximum comfort and safety.  It may be good to see everyone, tall or short, thin or fat, wearing only one type or model of safety glasses for the sack of uniformity despite of the differences in facial configurations.  A pairs of nice looking glasses fitted well on your face may not suit me because I have a smaller or flatter nose.  The glasses will drop and most likely rest and press on my cheek. Not only uncomfortable or pain on my cheek, the glasses may not give me the protection I need.

The written safety program must be made clearly known to all concerned and written in easy to understand language.  It should be accessible to all.

Knowing that safety is part of their learning syllabus and what to do exactly when they are coming for the class, I believe that the student will all comply with the requirement and wear their safety glasses at all time.  They should feel comfortable after learning to accept certain degree of discomfort for the sake of safety.  They will not complain any more because their complaints on discomfort are all being entertained and well answered.

On the other hand, the officer in charge is happy because his job is done.

Everyone, the students, the lecturer, the class-in-charge and even me as a supplier of the safety glasses will be happy because there is a WRITTEN safety program running.

Share This | StumbleUpon It!

Related posts:

1. One Type For All?
2. Writing Your Factory’s Own Safety Programme
3. Wearing gloves to serve food?
4. Safety in Your First Job
5. Tanizawa Lightweight & Heat Resistant Safety Helmet with EPA Buckle.

Wearing gloves to serve food?

HACCP and food safety article

If you are selling food in the hawker center or food court, do you need to wear gloves to prepare and serve the food to your customers?

Many times, we eat at coffee shop or hawker stall, the same person who serve us food with bare hands also receives cash from us with bare hands.  How would you feel? I am sure you have seen how your order is being served especially when you are eating at a hawker stall. Do you think that they should wear a pair of gloves so that their bare hands do not touch the food?

Many people think that cash (currency notes or coins) is most dirty because everybody handles cash with bare hands. Passing over hundreds or thousands of people’s hand, you can imagine how dirty it can be.

How would you then expect your orders be handled?  You may feel that it will be best that the hands that serve you food wear a pair of hand gloves.  However, can you be sure that the gloves are clean?  What if while he has just prepared your order wearing the same pair of gloves and during the preparation, he may have touched raw meat? Or he has just received cash from other customers without taking off the same pair of gloves? Or even worse, what if he has not changed his hand gloves since he started working at the stall that morning? The gloves may not be clean and can be even dirtier than bare hands.  If not gloves, would you rather prefer him to wash his hands before he brought you the food you have ordered?

Thus, wearing a pair of hand gloves does not guarantee cleanliness.  And let’s talk about food safety. Are you sure the hand gloves he is wearing are safe for handling food? Not all gloves are food safe unless they have compliance with accepted standards such as American FDA (Food & Drug Authority) food handling requirements.  Many gloves may release unsafe materials to the food.

The key question, as far as food sellers are concerned, is how to prepare and deliver food to the customer’s table so that the food is delicious, nutritious and safe for their consumption?  There is no standard procedure to achieve that for every food stall.  It all depends on how the food is prepared and served.

Let us take a chicken rice seller as an example and start from the kitchen.  Assuming that the kitchen is clean and foods are processed following Good Manufacturing Process. Our discussion here is, do they need to wear hand gloves in preparing the raw chicken before putting it to the pot for cooking?

The answer could either be “Yes” or “No”.

Washing your hand before cleaning the chicken is all you need while preparing the raw chicken for cooking. You do not need to wear hand glove to keep the chicken clean unless you want to protect your hands from the wet work.  I would put on a pair of dry and clean hand gloves if I am going to wash and clean a lot of chicken for quite a long time as I do not want to get eczema or nail-bed disorders due to fungal and bacterial growth. Wearing a pair of impermeable hand glove will protect my hands from the water and animal fats while I am washing and preparing the chicken for cooking. However, my hands may still be wet and macerated due to sweating. I have to keep my hands dry by regularly drying my hands and my gloves because a sweating hand inside the warm rubber glove is also a perfect environment for bacterial and fungal growth, causing skin diseases like eczema.

So, what happens if your hands sweat profusely in the gloves? Does that mean wearing gloves may not be the answer to protect your hand from wet works? Does that mean you have no choice but to do the washing and cleaning with bare hands and contract skin diseases in long run? No need to worry, there is a solution. If you opt to wear gloves, you can apply sweat reducing hand cream or lotion to your hands before wearing gloves.  If you opt not to wear gloves, you can apply water repelling hand cream (it must be food safe of course) to your hands, instead of wearing hand gloves, before starting the cleaning works.  Such hand cream could protect your hands from the water or animal fat also but you have to re-apply after a few hours.

Now, let’s get back to the chicken rice business. After cleaning the chickens, you cook them.  I presume that the temperature you use to cook them will kill all germs present in the raw chickens.

After cooking the chickens, some chefs they cool the chicken in cold water to give the chicken meat nice texture. Most chicken rice are served with the cold chicken. You can see in the chicken rice shop that somewhere near the person who is chopping the chicken into pieces, the whole cooked and cold chickens are hung on hooks and arranged nicely in row waiting to be chopped.

During handling of the cold chicken, until they were chopped into pieces and served on a dinner plate with rice to the customer’s table, the hands must be cleaned thoroughly with hand soap if you prefer to use your bare hands.  Frequent and repeated washing of hands may be necessary if you are doing something else that possibly cause your hands to be contaminated.  Also, make sure that there is no wound or any kind of skin disease on your hands.

If you do not want to wash your hand too many times (repeat washing hands too many times with hand soap can be worse than wearing hand gloves in term of eczema) or it is just not practical, then you have to wear hand gloves.

You can wear either disposable (single use) or reusable type of hand gloves.  They must be food safe (safe for food handling).

The most common disposable hand gloves are either made of 100% natural latex rubber or 100% nitrile (a synthetic rubber) rubber.  Single-use (disposable) hand gloves give best dexterity but limited hand protection because they are thin as compared to the reusable types. The reusable gloves on the other hand are thicker giving better protection to hand. Many, however, find that they can not work effectively with the hand gloves. This is mainly because they are wearing the wrong size gloves, either too large or too small.

Allergic to protein contained in the natural latex is another problem. If you do develop skin allergy after wearing the natural latex gloves, try the nitrile.  There are however increasing reports now on allergy to nitrile glove.  You can choose gloves made of some other materials.

For the cold (cooked) chicken handling, disposable types would be better than the reusable because first of all you do not need a high level of protection to your hand. The main purpose of wearing the disposable gloves is to prevent food contamination by hands.  Disposable gives the best level of dexterity because most of them are skin-tight like Doctor wearing their surgical gloves.

Remember to change the disposable gloves once broken.  Disposable latex gloves are quite easily torn or broken due to abrasion.  Nitrile glove has a higher level of resistance to puncture and abrasion.  Nitrile gloves however may cost you more than the latex gloves.

Wearing a pair of broken or torn gloves will not be safe for both hand and food. Take them off immediately, wash your hand with hand soap, dry them and put on a new pair of hand gloves.

One last thing, do not forget to wash your hands with gloves if you are doing something else that may contaminate the hand gloves.  If they are disposables, you may as well change a new pair. Unless you keep your hand gloves clean at all time, wearing hand gloves does not guarantee food safety.

It is therefore a matter of choice and that is absolutely your discretion.  The primary purpose of wearing hand gloves is in fact to protect hands.  You should put gloves on if you need hand protection in whatever you do.  If hand protection is not necessary, you can use bare hands.  Frequent washing hands with hand soap could be more effective than wearing gloves and it is absolutely perfect to handle food with bare hands if your hands are clean.  However, if you do not want to wash your hands too many times to make your hands vulnerable to microbial infection, you have no choice but to wear gloves. If you do that, you have to make sure the gloves on your hands are kept clean at all times during the process of food preparation and serving to your customers.

Share This | StumbleUpon It!

Related posts:

1. Fitting of Hand Gloves
2. Ansell Edmont Disposable PE Gloves
3. Correct use of facemask or respirator for influenza prevention
4. Flu-Safety Personal Pack
5. What for wearing a respirator if it does not fitted well to your face

Writing Your Factory’s Own Safety Programme

You are the owner of a factory and have spent money buying Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) such as safety spectacles, goggles, earplug, earmuff, respirators etc but still find that the safety standard of your factory is not improving because the workers do not use them in a satisfactory manner.

You feel that money spent was not justified because your workers are just too reluctant to use them even though you have told them to use them properly for their protection.

Do you wonder why?

The main reason, as I see it, is that you do not have a written safety programme for your factory. Without a written programme, you, your company, your management and the end users – your workers, are not committed to improve the safety standard of your factory and for the sake of their safety and health.

You may have trained the workers when issuing them the PPE but such training soon are forgotten and you find most of the PPE issued is out of their proper places. It is not uncommon finding that wrong cartridges or filters are used on the respirators for the protection required. Asking the users why and the answers are always “I do not know”, or “They just give me these so I use them”.

Question: Can all these be eliminated so that everybody involved will be happy about using PPE?

Answer: YES. It can be done provided you do take the trouble to write you own safety programme.

Question: Your next question could then be – I do not know how to write a safety programme and I do not want to pay a large sum of money for someone else to write one for me. Consultant fee is expensive.

Answer: In fact, you can write you own safety programme if you want to and you do not have to ask a consultant to do that for you. An experienced sales person on PPE should be able to help you with all the information you need to write the programme.

It is within our package of supply and service that when we deliver PPE to our customers, we would like to make sure that they know how to use them properly. The safety programme will normally be introduced to them during the product training and it is up to the management to decide what to incorporate into their safety programme.

Such training is free of charge for our customers if you are operating in Kuching, Sarawak or somewhere near. You can contact us for more information about our service.

At the meantime, you may check on our website for more articles on safety programme from time to time.

Share This | StumbleUpon It!

Related posts:

1. Safety in Your First Job
2. Safety should be in the learning syllabus
3. About
4. One Type For All?
5. What for wearing a respirator if it does not fitted well to your face