How To Avoid Overheating Whilst Wearing Safety Equipment

During the summer months for some outdoor jobs and throughout the year in some cases, heat stress is an issue that can affect workers, particularly if they are required to wear safety equipment as part of their trade workwear for the job.

Given the record temperatures Great Britain has seen this summer, many more workers have been affected by heat stress, heat exhaustion and heat stroke than in previous years, and it has made it more important than ever to ensure that heat safety is ensured without compromising other safety protocols.

However, there is a way to have both safety when it is needed and vital cooling as well, and here are some examples of ways an employer can help.

Never Compromise Safety

It is important to ensure that before a worker needs to put on PPE they are as cool and relaxed as possible and that they are encouraged to remove it as soon as it is no longer required, but at no point should PPE standards be compromised.

At the same time, it may be worth performing a risk assessment to see if workers could wear either upgraded, lighter versions of the same protective garments or whether they could wear less PPE and still be protected.

Slow Down Workers

The four risks of heat stress are:

• Working climate, in other words, the temperature, humidity, breeze and proximity to heat.
• The breathability of work clothing and/or PPE.
• The rate of work, as the harder someone is working the more heat they will invariably generate.
• Individual factors, such as body type, health conditions and age, which can affect heat tolerance.

One way to help protect workers is to allow them to work slower and thus generate less heat, as well as rotate them out of the hot environment more frequently and let them recover for longer than they would otherwise.

In some cases, you may be able to reschedule the work outside of the most extreme temperatures, as is commonly the case in equatorial countries where the midday heat can be dangerously warm.