Canadian Occupational Safety

22 Canadian Occupational Safety | www.cos-mag.com forthcoming publication of ISEA 138, Performance and Classification for Impact Resistant Hand Protection, by the International Safety Equipment Association, seeks to change that. The new standard sets indus- try-accepted guidelines for testing impact-resistant gloves and defines three levels of impact resistance. Safety managers will be able to compare dif- ferent gloves providing back-of-hand impact protection, validate manufac- turers' performance claims and select gloves that provide hand protection appropriate to the job task. "A huge number of impact-resis- tant gloves come on the market every month and end users have no easy, clear means of making objective comparisons," says Rodney Taylor, global sales and marketing manager for industrial personal protective equipment (PPE) at Blacksburg, Va.-based D3O. "The standard will help them cut through all that by establishing three ver y clear, objective performance levels." Hands are the most often-injured body parts. There are about 500,000 injuries to hands in Canada every year, according to the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety. In 2016, there were 7,902 time-loss injuries to hands (excluding fingers) and 20,020 time-loss injuries involv- ing fingers only. Injuries to the back of the hand can result in bruises, cuts, lacera- tions, abrasions, punctures, soft tissue damage and severe bone fractures of the metacarpal bones (the bones between the wrist and fingers) and the phalanges (the finger and thumb bones). Fingers are particularly vulner- able to injury, and in some industries, such as oil and gas, injuries involving the fingers occur frequently. Impact-related injuries occur in sev- eral ways, says Jason Atkinson, safety IMPACT specialist at Acklands-Grainger. First, a hand may be struck by an object, as when a worker using a hammer accidently strikes her own or another worker's hand. Alternatively, the hand may slip off something, such as a wrench, and strike something else, hurting the hand and knuckles. An injury may also occur when a worker's hand is caught between two objects that strike each other, as when, for example, a worker is loading a vehicle trunk and another person closes the lid on the back of the worker's hand. Crush injuries are often caused by falling objects, drawers and doors. Hands and fingers may also get caught or crushed in the chains, wheels, rollers or gears of the equipment being held. "It's a lot of force that generates it and typically it happens by accident, where the job itself doesn't cause the hazard. It's when the hand slips or something else slips and falls on it," says Atkinson, who is based in Burn- aby, B.C. Back-of-hand injuries are very common. About 75 per cent of all hand injuries are the result of "struck by" and "caught in/on/between" incidents, according to Ontario's Workplace Safety North. They also tend to be under-reported, being sometimes misidentified as cut inju- ries. They occur to workers in many industries, including automotive, construction, heavy equipment opera- tion, cargo handling, mining and oil and gas. They can also happen in any workplace; they are a common risk for people who work in manufacturing, warehouses, transport and towing. "There's no industry that wouldn't be affected; it depends on the type of work that workers are doing," Atkinson says. The most commonly used mate- rial for back-of-hand protection is thermoplastic rubber (TPR). The TPR forms a rigid rubber padding going A mill worker was feed- ing strips of wood into a splicer, a machine that cuts, presses and glues together wood strips to create hard- wood veneer. The mill, located just east of North Bay, Ont., produced hardwood plywood and was owned by Columbia Forest Products. The worker's hand was suddenly drawn into the machine by the wood and the fingertips came in contact with a pinch point. The worker suffered crushing injuries to the fingers and amputation of the tip of a middle finger. The majority of injuries to the hands are impact-related, causing cut and crushing injuries. Despite their frequency, there has never been a North American standard specifically targeted at back-of-hand impacts. The across the back of the hand and knuckles and down the fingers and, sometimes, the back of the thumbs. The rest of the glove could contain materials designed to protect against another kind of hazard, such as abra- sion or chemical exposure. Compared to leather or gloves without TPR, the TPR backing does provide impact protection, Atkinson says. TPR provides shock-absorbing and deflecting properties for the back of the glove. It also has some elasticity, which allows the glove to remain pli- able for ease of job performance. However, the protective ability of gloves labelled "TPR" can var y widely, and in the absence of any sure way to evaluate protective properties, it is impossible for safety managers to make comparisons between any of the different TPR gloves available on the market. The only existing stan- dard for impact resistance designed to protect the back of the hand and knuckles — the European EN 388: 2016 Protective Gloves Against Mechanical Risks — defines criteria on a pass-or-fail basis only. It sets no rating levels. Moreover, EN 388 was not specifically designed for indus- trial gloves and is not used much in North America. "That's the crux of the need for a change in the standard (ANSI/ISEA 105: 2016, Hand Protection Classifi- cation). Currently, you can measure anything from cut resistance — so you know how much cut or abrasion resistance a glove might offer — to permeation of chemicals or blood- borne pathogens to protect for a certain job task," says Jeremy Slater, Vancouver-based regional sales man- ager at Acklands-Grainger. "This new standard is just taking one common injury, impact to the back of the hand, and putting a finer measure- ment on it so that people select the correct level of protection for a particu- lar job task. We've seen that across all kinds of safety products: one size does not fit all. I think this will make people safer at the end of the day." ISEA 138 sets out performance standards, including minimum per for mance requirements, for industrial gloves designed to pro- tect the knuckles and fingers from impact. It classifies materials used in back-of-hand protection according SOFTENING THE By Linda Johnson A new ISEA standard for anti-impact hand protection will help safety managers reduce back-of-hand injuries

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