SAFETY ALERT | Ring Finger Injuries

1. Safety Bulletin
Incident Date: October 2016 Title: Ring Finger Injuries
#031
Before commencing duties, all safety critical Freightliner
employees are required to either remove finger rings, or tape
up the ring with surgical tape.
This is being introduced to protect Freightliner employees from suffering such
injuries. No-one ever expects an accident to happen to them but unfortunately
accidents do happen, often when you least expect them to. The discipline of
removing or taping rings is widespread in the engineering industry – the precaution
works, so follow it!
Overview of Events:
A member of G&W staff recently suffered a nasty injury when his left glove got caught on the
ribbed surface of a ladder foothold as he was descending a piece of equipment. The ribbed
surface tore a hole in the glove and then, unfortunately, caught on his ring which he was
wearing on his left index finger. With the employee’s bodyweight acting against him, the ring
caused a serious laceration to his left index finger which caused significant pain, required
surgery and a long time off work. This type of injury is known as a ring avulsion injury.
Ring Avulsion - sudden trauma to the finger when a ring is forcefully pulled, causing the ring to
pull on the tissues of the finger. This can lead to injury in varying degrees of severity, ranging
from bruising to traumatic amputation of the finger.
The photograph above shows the actual
injury suffered by our G&W colleague. He
was fortunate it wasn’t worse!
The photographs above show some more
serious ring avulsion injuries all caused by
wearing of a ring finger (non-FL injury)