Personal protective equipment (PPE) refers to protective clothing, helmets, goggles, or other garment or equipment designed to protect the wearer's body from injury by blunt impacts, electrical hazards, heat, chemicals, and infection, for job-related occupational safety and health purposes, and in sports, martial arts, combat, etc. Personal armor is combat-specialized protective gear. In British legislation the term PPE does not cover items such as armour. The terms "protective gear" and "protective clothing" are in many cases interchangeable; "protective clothing" is applied to traditional categories of clothing, and "gear" is a more general term and preferably means uniquely protective categories, such as pads, guards, shields, masks, etc. Items such as fire extinguishers, first aid kits are equipment to support the personal protection of the subject. Police use handcuffs, tasers, batons and handguns as PPE.
The use of personal protective equipment is to reduce employee exposure to hazards when engineering and administrative controls are not feasible or effective to reduce these risks to acceptable levels.
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Protective equipment for biological hazards includes masks worn by medical personnel (especially in surgery to avoid infecting the patient but also to avoid exposing the personnel to infection from the patient.) Gloves, frequently changed, are used to prevent infection but also transfer between patients.
One measure to reduce the risks of transmitting skin microorganisms from one person to another is in the use of single use disposable blood pressure cuff covers. Reports of hospitals reducing their hospital acquired infection rate by nearly 50% through the use of disposable protective covers for blood pressure cuffs have been reported.
Ballistic personal protective equipment (or armor) is used in combat by soldiers and in lesser conflicts by law enforcement.
A face shield protects from flying debris such as produced by cutting, welding, chipping, or sanding, and protects against splashes or spray of liquids. Safety glasses provide protection for the eyes and may additionally be tinted to block UV or laser light. Goggles seal tightly about the eyes and provide superior protection from dust, dirt, and fumes.
Meat packers and others who routinely use hand-held knives in their work may use mail gloves to protect the hands from cuts. Those in other professions where sharps injuries are a concern often utilize cut and puncture resistant protective gloves, and hand held safety tools that offer critical stand-off distance between themselves and whatever they may come into contact.
Law enforcement and Corrections officers wear Blunt Trauma PPE for crowd management, civil disturbances, cell extractions, riot control, violent disturbances, and other emergency response operations. To assure their equipment is safe, end-users and industry refer to standards:
When a person works in an area of radioactive contamination, anti-contamination clothing, often including gloves, shoe covers, and masks are worn, usually in addition to regular clothes. To prevent radioactive particles from entering the suit, duct tape may be used to seal the openings. In cases of heavy contamination, it is often more convenient to wear two or more layers of anti-c's to help limit contamination in the place designated to remove the clothes. For example, if two layers of clothes are worn, the first layer can be removed without threatening the contamination of clothes worn underneath.
Anti-c's protect the wearer from radioactive contamination and some forms of radiation. Although gamma rays cannot be attenuated by clothing, alpha particles can be stopped and beta particles can be somewhat blocked by a layer of clothing.
Protective clothing is also worn for contact sports, such as ice hockey and American football. Baseball players wear sliding shorts and a cup under their pants. See baseball clothing and equipment, cuirass, goalie mask, jockstrap. Law in many countries requires protective headgear and eyewear for riding a motorcycle.
Helmets have been custom made for those with cranial injuries or abnormalities to avoid potential brain damage.
Respirators such as "gas masks" and particulate respirators filter chemicals and gases or airborne particles. A second type of respirator protects users by providing clean, respirable air from another source. This type includes airline respirators and self-contained breathing apparatus (SCUBA).[4] In work environments, respirators are used when adequate ventilation is not available or other engineering control systems are not feasible.[4]
In the United Kingdom, an organization that has extensive expertise in respiratory protective equipment is the Institute of Occupational Medicine. This expertise has been built on a long-standing and varied research programme that has included the setting of workplace protection factors to the assessment of efficacy of masks available through high street retail outlets.
See List of personal protective equipment by body area
Common protective materials include Nomex and Kevlar. Another material often used in PPE, is SuperFabric.