Successful Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) management will affect directly the overall performance of safety in the company. Simply because PPE protects workers from various kinds of hazards.
Even though PPE is not the first level of hazard control method, however according to hse.gov, every year there are 9,000 PPE-related accidents caused by improper PPE usage or not wearing PPE.
This article will layout the secret of successful PPE management. It will show you steps to do to have better PPE management.
Follow all of the points below in order to be able to ensure that all required PPE are fulfilled with the right specification, adequate quantity, for all areas of use.
- Determine the PPE policy clearly. Show that the company has a strong commitment to providing proper PPE for all the workers. Provide enough budget for this purpose. Even the company is ready to allocate additional budget if there is a need for it.
- Assign the right persons who will responsible to manage PPE in the company. They should focus to manage PPE.
- Keep watching to the regulation or standard change in the PPE topic. Do not leave behind the change. Otherwise, your efforts will have less impact on the overall PPE management.
- Identify the needs of PPE. The first thing you should do is to identify PPE requirements for every point of use, for every activity. This is the key for you to calculate the budget too.
- Develop all required SOP. PPE expiry date, specification, and standards.
- Provide minimum PPE inventory. PPE needs to be replaced when you find damaged PPEs. This requires immediate replacement, which must be taken from PPE inventory.
- Provide appropriate storage for the PPE to keep PPE in good condition and easy to take whenever you need them.
- Schedule PPE preventive maintenance. This effort is very important to keep all PPE are always ready to use and can stand until its expected life.
- Evaluate the results. Regular evaluation is very important to measure the effectiveness of your effort in managing PPE. By doing this, you will be able to improve the results continuously.
