High school students are entering the workforce, and as a result are more exposed to risks that come with some jobs. The CNIB and WorkSafe Saskatchewan want to ensure these students know the importance of safety procedures, and carry them through their lives. They visited Yorkton Regional High School to deliver presentations to students on the importance of eye protection.
Amber-Joy Boyd with CNIB says there are 720,000 eye injury cases annually which could have been prevented with proper safety equipment. Their goal is to get people thinking about eye safety and starting to get into safe habits young, so they don’t have to carry an eye injury through life.
“It’s so important because imagine if you were sixteen and lost your vision to a nail gun accident, that’s the rest of your life gone, so it’s so important of wearing the eye safety. Not just in the shop, but when they’re fishing, when they’re using chainsaws, when they’re mowing the lawn, all those things that people don’t normally wear safety gear during, just to make sure they’re wearing safety gear on a regular basis.”
They went beyond just telling students to wear safety gear, also giving them two pairs of glasses in order to ensure they have no excuse to avoid it. The pairs included one clear pair, as well as a pair of CSA-approved sunglasses.
The challenge is to break through a teenager’s inflated sense of their own invulnerability, and Boyd says that they’re using shock value in their presentation so students can see just how dangerous some of these activities can be.
“There are some very graphic pictures in there of injuries that have happened and could happen to these kids. One’s a chemical burn, one’s an embedded object, metal off a grinder, one’s a fishing hook that got caught in the eye. These are very real things that could happen to these guys, so we drive home that these could have prevented if you wear the thing we hand you today.”
They are travelling around the province with the presentations. Boyd says that they are popular because the shop teachers see the value of the presentation, and having a clear and graphic way of showing kids the importance of wearing safety gear.
