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Personal protective equipment

Personal protective equipment (PPE) is protective clothing, helmets, goggles, or other garments or equipment designed to protect the wearer's body from injury or infection. The hazards addressed by protective equipment include physical, electrical, heat, chemical, biohazards, and airborne particulate matter. Protective equipment may be worn for job-related occupational safety and health purposes, as well as for sports and other recreational activities. Protective clothing is applied to traditional categories of clothing, and protective gear applies to items such as pads, guards, shields, or masks, and others. PPE suits can be similar in appearance to a cleanroom suit.

The purpose of personal protective equipment is to reduce employee exposure to hazards when engineering controls and administrative controls are not feasible or effective to reduce these risks to acceptable levels. PPE is needed when there are hazards present. PPE has the serious limitation that it does not eliminate the hazard at the source and may result in employees being exposed to the hazard if the equipment fails.[1]


Any item of PPE imposes a barrier between the wearer/user and the working environment. This can create additional strains on the wearer, impair their ability to carry out their work and create significant levels of discomfort. Any of these can discourage wearers from using PPE correctly, therefore placing them at risk of injury, ill-health or, under extreme circumstances, death. Good ergonomic design can help to minimise these barriers and can therefore help to ensure safe and healthy working conditions through the correct use of PPE.


Practices of occupational safety and health can use hazard controls and interventions to mitigate workplace hazards, which pose a threat to the safety and quality of life of workers. The hierarchy of hazard controls provides a policy framework which ranks the types of hazard controls in terms of absolute risk reduction. At the top of the hierarchy are elimination and substitution, which remove the hazard entirely or replace the hazard with a safer alternative. If elimination or substitution measures cannot be applied, engineering controls and administrative controls – which seek to design safer mechanisms and coach safer human behavior – are implemented. Personal protective equipment ranks last on the hierarchy of controls, as the workers are regularly exposed to the hazard, with a barrier of protection. The hierarchy of controls is important in acknowledging that, while personal protective equipment has tremendous utility, it is not the desired mechanism of control in terms of worker safety.

provide better protection than safety glasses, and are effective in preventing eye injury from chemical splashes, impact, dusty environments and welding.[13] Goggles with high air flow should be used to prevent fogging.[13]

Goggles

provide additional protection and are worn over the standard eyewear; they also provide protection from impact, chemical, and blood-borne hazards.[13]

Face shields

Full-facepiece respirators are considered the best form of eye protection when respiratory protection is needed as well, but may be less effective against potential impact hazards to the eye.

[13]

Eye protection for welding is shaded to different degrees, depending on the specific operation.

[13]

Limits of the definition

The definition of what constitutes personal protective equipment varies by country. In the United States, the laws regarding PPE also vary by state. In 2011, workplace safety complaints were brought against Hustler and other adult film production companies by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, leading to several citations brought by Cal/OSHA.[21] The failure to use condoms by adult film stars was a violation of Cal/OSHA's Blood borne Pathogens Program, Personal Protective Equipment.[21] This example shows that personal protective equipment can cover a variety of occupations in the United States, and has a wide-ranging definition.

Category I: simple design (e.g. gardening gloves, footwear, ski goggles)

Category II: PPE not falling into category I or III (e.g. personal flotation devices, dry and wet suits, )

motorcycle personal protective equipment

Category III: complex design (e.g. respiratory equipment, harnesses)

Research

Research studies in the form of randomized controlled trials and simulation studies are needed to determine the most effective types of PPE for preventing the transmission of infectious diseases to healthcare workers.[4]


There is low certainty evidence that supports making improvements or modifications to PPE in order to help decrease contamination.[4] Examples of modifications include adding tabs to masks or gloves to ease removal and designing protective gowns so that gloves are removed at the same time.[4] In addition, there is low certainty evidence that the following PPE approaches or techniques may lead to reduced contamination and improved compliance with PPE protocols: Wearing double gloves, following specific doffing (removal) procedures such as those from the CDC, and providing people with spoken instructions while removing PPE.[4]

CDC - Emergency Response Resources: Personal Protective Equipment - NIOSH Workplace Safety and Health Topic

European Commission, DG Enterprise, Personal Protective Equipment

Directive 89/686/EEC on Personal Protective Equipment

Archived 2020-07-28 at the Wayback Machine INDG174(rev1), revised 8/05 (HSE)

A short guide to the Personal Protective Equipment at Work Regulations 1992'