Eye injury may not be one the first areas of the body you think of protecting, but it should be. Workplace eye injury affects thousands of employees’ ability to work and costs employers millions of dollars each year.
Let’s dive into what an eye injury can cost you, and how to properly protect your employee’s health and safety at work.
Do your Employees Work in a High Risk Industry?
According to the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, over 2,000 U.S. employees “receive medical care because of eye injuries sustained at work.” Eye injury is the leading cause of vision loss, disability and blindness and can dramatically prevent an employee to do their job.
Eye injury has a surprisingly long-term and devastating impact on both the employee and the employer. The bad news? If your employees are in the following industries, they’re at risk:
- Carpentry
- Construction
- Mining
- Manufacturing
- Welding
- Plumbing
- Electrical work
- Auto repair.
The good news?
90 percent of work related eye injuries that take place are preventable. Safe working practices (like those from our checklist below) are the key to stopping injuries from taking place in the first place!
An Eye Injury Checklist
Here are some steps you can take today to eliminate eye injury for tomorrow! They’re simple to do and easy to integrate into your day-to-day:
Give a Safety Talk on Eye Protection, and First-Aid Measures
It’s the employers responsibility to make sure workers have the proper gear on – and information about how to use their gear – to protect them from harm. Assign a supervisor prior to the start of each shift to make sure employees have the following:
- Goggles
- Welding helmets
- Safety glasses with side shields
Making sure employees hold themselves accountable by wearing the right protection gear will prevent eye injury from taking place. For employees, it allows them to maintain their health, do their job, and continue to bring in a paycheck. For employers, it can reduce healthcare costs (often, by thousands of dollars per claim) and prevent a disruption in the productivity of your workforce!
Hold Employees Accountable For Staying Safe
You can do this through toolbox talks, occupational health programs and delegating quick ‘safety checks’ to supervisors before and during each shift. Place protective barriers and/or flags around high risk areas.
Protect Your Employees By Going Beyond Protection Gear
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, eye injuries cost $4 billion in productivity and wage loss, and “incur more than $924 million annually in workers’ compensation.”
Axiom Medical provides injury case management to employees, by keeping 65 percent of all cases called in at a First Aid level.
Whether you have a 100 or 10,000 employees, Axiom’s nurse case managers are available 24/7 to monitor and manage employee injury. Contact us today for more information on how we keep employees healthy, safe and fit to do the job they were hired to do.
Heather lives and writes by the motto, “No coffee, no workee,” and is passionate about helping others live a happier and healthier life. When she’s not writing away, you can find her playing basketball with her two sons, planning her next getaway “somewhere tropical” or trying out a new recipe with chocolate as the main ingredient.
Find out more about our Injury Case Management services or our Occupational Health Programs.