COVER STORY
FACE FIT YOUR WORKFORCE, SAYS ARCO
Arco have joined the fight against workplace lung disease and are urging employers to save workers lives with a 20 minute ‘face fit’ test.
It takes just 20 minutes to test and kit out a worker with a professionally fitted face mask, yet every day, thousands of construction workers are put at risk of contracting lung disease, breathing in deadly silica dust through poorly fitting respiratory equipment.
Kevin Williams, Respiratory Services Manager at Arco commented: “You wouldn’t submerge a diver under water with a leaking mask, so why do we send construction workers into potentially deadly breathing conditions every day? Arco now has the largest mobile Fit2Fit accredited face fit testing team in the UK so can conduct testing on an organisation’s site dramatically reducing the amount of employee down time involved attending a testing centre.”
Although construction dust poses a significant risk to workers, with the potential to cause serious long term damage to a person’s health, many construction workers are unaware or ill-informed of its effect on the body. This is also partly because many of the symptoms and health conditions that develop as a result of past exposure to construction dust may take several years to develop. As a result, the immediate consequence of potentially harmful workplace exposure levels are often dismissed or underestimated in comparison to the immediate impact of injuries in the workplace. By the time consideration is taken to past exposure it is often too late to reverse or halt the effects.
The most common illnesses linked to breathing construction dust into the lungs include silicosis, lung cancers, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and occupational
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asthma. Silicosis is a progressive disease where accumulation of respirable crystalline silica particles in the lungs causes an inflammatory reaction, leading to tissue damage and scarring. This can progress, leading to complications that can result in disability or death. COPD, more commonly associated with smoking, is also a significant cause of occupational deaths. Individuals diagnosed with COPD suffer from an obstruction of the airways, which become inflamed and narrowed. Lung function is impaired and affected workers are often diagnosed with work-related emphysema or chronic bronchitis.
In 2015, approximately 3,500 people died from cancer caused by past exposures to asbestos, 500 more from silica dust, another 5,500 will be diagnosed with occupational cancer, and – today alone – an unknown but significant number will breathe in the hazardous substances that will one day seriously affect their health or kill them.
As members of Fit2Fit, an accreditation scheme set up by the British Safety Industry Federation (BSIF) to confirm the competency of any person performing face piece fit testing, Arco has helped to protect thousands of workers in the past 12 months alone.
As people’s faces differ in shape and size, it is unlikely that one particular type or size of RPE face-piece will fit every individual. Face-fit testing checks that the equipment selected is suitable for the wearer.
Arco conduct training and testing on two methods; quantitative and
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