Respiratory Protection – 5 Tips to Keep your Employees Safe & Healthy

When it comes to ensuring workplace safety at construction sites, employers are always up on their toes focusing on fall protection, feet protection, hand protection and head protection. Even though these are important to ensure the safety of employees, these are not the only factors that need to taken into consideration. What is often overlooked by most employees is getting the right respiratory protection gear in place.

Breathing bad quality air is one of the most dangerous hazards most employees are exposed to. Workers often find themselves working at sites where they are exposed to a lot of potentially harmful substances such as chemicals, toxic fumes and vapours. Work sites free of chemicals and toxic substances might involve the use of machines such as saws that generate a lot of dust which can block respiratory passages. Thus, the use of respiratory masks and other respiratory protection is really important.

If you, as an employer, have not paid heed to the respiratory aspect of your workers’ protection so far, find below a few tips to help you hit the nail on the head so as to keep your workers as close to foolproof in terms of safety as possible while they are sweating it out for you:

1. Identifying & Understanding the Hazards
No two work sites are the same. It is of great significance that you, upon keen and patient observation, enlist all the potential hazards and the risks that your workers are exposed to, while at the job. Whether your employees are required to cut, grind, weld and deal with lead based products or cut through concrete that is a source of silica dust, you must enlist it all down from scratch to identify measures to counter each one of them one after the other.

2. Choosing the Right Respiratory Protection
Not every type of respiratory protection can protect against all kinds of hazards. Different settings demand that respiratory protection be used to ensure absolute breathing safety. Air filtration systems, airline cooling systems, cartridges and filters, disposable respirators, dust masks, full face respirators, half mask respirators and supplied air respirators, all protect against different kinds of hazardous substances.

3. Knowing When to Use the Respiratory Gear
Knowing when to put on safety gear is equally important. Safety signs are a great way of reminding your employees that they have entered potentially harmful territory and that they must wear adequate respiratory protection immediately. Safety signs can be installed all over the potentially dangerous place. If it is not possible for you to set up safety signs all over the place, you must at least place them at strategic locations where they are bound to attract your employees’ attention, fulfilling the purpose.

4. Training in Proper Usage of Respiratory Protection
You must train your employees on the proper use of respiratory protection. Many employees, under the misconception that they are wearing respiratory masks, go on breathing normally, without realizing that they are constantly inhaling poisonous vapours. As an employer, it is your duty to conduct live demonstration and training sessions to train all your employees on the proper usage of face masks and shields.

5. Maintaining the Respiratory Gear
Ensure that your employees are maintaining their respiratory gear post each workday and are not using equipment that is faulty and beyond the scope of maintenance.

The said measures will definitely ensure the well-being of the respiratory tract of your employees. Furthermore, it is imperative that you buy respiratory protection from renowned manufacturers such as Intech, Karam, Frontier, to name a few.

Author-bio: Ziya is an avid reader with the same voracious appetite. He is interested in the current trends in E Commerce and time to time writes about career and other interesting topics.