Occupational Medicine & Health Affairs
Open Access

Review Article

A Review of Sir Thomas Legge’s Aphorisms and Workplace Personal Protective Equipments – Is There Gap in Knowledge, Attitude and Utilization?

Occupational Health Physician, University of Nsukka, Nigeria

*Corresponding Author:

Emmanuel N Aguwa
Occupational Health Physician
University of Nsukka, Nigeria
E-mail: enaguwa@yahoo.com

Received date: September 20, 2013; Accepted date: October 30, 2013; Published date: November 08, 2013

Citation: Aguwa EN (2013) A Review of Sir Thomas Legge’s Aphorisms and Workplace Personal Protective Equipments – Is There Gap in Knowledge, Attitude and Utilization? Occup Med Health Aff 1:134. doi: 10.4172/2329-6879.1000134

Copyright: © 2013 Aguwa EN. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Sir Thomas Legge and other researchers have long established the need to protect workers from workplace hazards. Protection of workers from workplace hazards is crucial to reduce mortality and morbidity in the workplace. Many of these morbidity and mortality occur long after the workman has left the work. Hence besides other control measures it becomes important to assess compliance of the employer/employee with personal protective equipment (PPE). Methods: Secondary data were collected from previous literatures involving different occupations in different countries. Results in most studies showed poor knowledge of work hazards/PPE, attitude and utilization of PPEs in most occupations. The commonest reasons for poor utilization of PPEs were discomfort, reduction in work efficiency, emergency nature of work and feeling of low vulnerability of worker to hazard. Conclusion: Besides making appropriate PPEs to be always available, focus should be at attitudinal change of workers to make them and their employers think “safety first”.

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