Why Are Safety Gloves Important?

What is a safety glove?

A safety glove is a piece of personal protection equipment, or PPE, worn by workers to protect their hands from injuries at the workplace. Some of these gloves provide protection from amputations, abrasions, cuts, bruises, friction blisters, splinters, burns, chemicals, and disease. Studies have shown that workers who wear gloves are 60% less likely to experience hand injuries.

How safety gloves can help you

Each year more than one million workers are sent to the hospital for emergency care due to hand injuries. Over 70% of employees that end up in the emergency room with injured hands are found to have not been wearing gloves. Hand injuries are one of the most common work-related injuries.

The following injuries can be avoided by selecting the correct safety gloves for the handling application, and ensuring that these safety gloves are worn at the right times:

• Puncture wounds
• Cuts and scrapes
• Heat and chemical burns
• Hazardous substances that can irritate or be absorbed by the skin
• Extreme heat or cold
• Biological agents like bacteria and viruses
• Loss of finger, nail and skin
• Needle stick injuries

Who wears safety gloves?

Work gloves are intended to suit a variety of workers. What is used in their construction depends primarily on the needs of specific employees. These gloves offer different functionality to their wearers. Safety gloves can benefit many workers in multiple fields. Professions such as loggers, welders, manufacturing, industrial, farmers and medical personnel could all require various different types of safety gloves.

Safety glove types

Listed below are a few types of safety gloves and a brief description of their purpose:

• Full metal mesh, canvas gloves - protects against burns, sustained heat and cuts
• Leather gloves - protects against rough objects, sparks, chips and moderate heat
• Aluminised gloves - protects against heat and reflective
• Aramid fibre gloves - protects against cold and heat
• Synthetic material gloves - protects against thermal cold and heat, cuts and some weak acids
• Fabric and coated fabric gloves - protects against chafing, blisters, slivers and dirt
• Liquid and chemical resistant gloves - protects against dermatitis, burns and irritation caused by solvents, oils and other chemicals
• Rubber and natural latex gloves - protects against some abrasions from polishing, sandblasting and grinding.
• Neoprene gloves - protects against tears from alcohol, organic acids, alkalis, gasoline and hydraulic fluid
• Nitrile rubber gloves - protects against perchloroethylene and other chlorinated solvents
• Anti-vibration gloves - protects against a condition known as hand arm vibration syndrome

S U M M A R Y

To summarise, safety gloves can protect us against workplace injuries like puncture wounds, cuts, scrapes and burns, to name a few. Safety gloves can be worn by workers in multiple fields such as logging, welding, manufacturing, etc. Here at Total Workwear, we are proud to offer our customers an enormous selection of safety gloves that we have organised into categories such as cut resistant, impact resistant and anti-static/ESD gloves.

to view our range of safety gloves workwear