COVER STORY EYE ON THE FUTURE
With many tradespeople regularly risking their eyesight at work, Specsavers explains how its prescription safety eyewear meets new standards, providing robust protection as well as comfort and durability.
Eye care on the job needs work. Injuries at work can be life-changing, causing irreversible damage to the sight of those impacted and often leading to costly claims against employers. Despite the danger, they remain one of the most frequent forms of accidents on site – in research by Specsavers, more than a third of workers said they know someone who had injured their eyes at work.
The figures also show that workers aren’t currently protecting their eyes – a quarter of tradespeople said they don’t currently protect their eyes on site. The challenge is particularly acute for those who need prescription lenses to see. Current requirements for eye protection don’t mandate the provision of prescription safety glasses, and balancing safety glasses on top of regular frames can be prohibitively cumbersome, so many tradespeople end up simply wearing their regular glasses at work and risking their eyes in the process.
Prescription safety eyewear is an effective and underrated solution and could be gamechanger for this huge slice of the workforce. The availability, quality and accessibility of prescription safety eyewear has expanded significantly in recent years, and the latest collections offer robust protection, as well as comfort and durability.
NEW RULES Advances in manufacturing techniques, and greater attention to the varying risks to eye health on busy work sites, have spurred the consistent improvement of safety glasses available on the market. Until recently, regulations specifying the requirements for safety eyewear had failed to keep up with the pace of development. Until
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November 2024, the standard for safety eyewear dated back to 2001 and wasn’t designed for these more advanced products or work sites that have themselves evolved in the last two decades.
The new standard that came into force at the end of last year, EN ISO 16321-1:2022, includes significant updates to the requirements and testing methods for eye protection. The changes include expanding the number of required head forms to six to bring an end to the one-size-fits-all approach that has been the norm on many work sites. Other updates include revised mechanical strength requirements and new lens filter markings, both intended to upgrade the standard of protection offered by safety glasses across the industry.
It’s undeniable that the new standard is a significant step forward, but the almost half of tradespeople who need glasses to see won’t be able to properly access these benefits without a prescription pair. The bottom line is that, at the moment, they’re at risk.
A REAL SOLUTION Prescription safety eyewear is available and effective, but there’s a distinct lack of awareness among the workers for whom it could make a real difference – only one in five tradespeople told Specsavers that they knew about prescription safety glasses, despite 60% wearing their everyday glasses on site.
Dona Mclafferty, Corporate Account Manager of Safety Eyewear at Specsavers, said: “Our research shows that site safety has a serious eye care blind spot, one which is putting workers at risk. Safety glasses have come a long
TOMORROW’S HEALTH & SAFETY YEARBOOK 2025/26
WWW.TOMORROWSHS.COM
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