Risk of rolling sleeves up during the warm weather?

During the summer months when the weather is warm production staff become uncomfortable when they are working on line. some of the jobs are quite manual and involve some heavy lifting. They have asked if they can roll their overall sleeves up. I have tried to do some research but I haven't found anything that would allow this. Based on risk, it would be very low that a product would become contaminated. Does anybody else allow their staff to roll their overall sleeves up? 

Greetings Dawnmo,

Having done the risk assessement is a good start, depending on what you have taken into consideration. You do have to care for your employees health during work.

If it is an RTE product there is generally small room for workarounds, compared to others. If it is a fully closed sytem you can be less strict. However, you can "dissect" the production line to something like high risk - low risk.

A rough scenario could be that reception (heavy lifting) could be more lax than when the raw material is on the production line and especially if there is a kill step, then from that point and until the product is packed you can't allow rolled up sleeves. After packaging you could be lax again (heavy lifitng again), provided there are no worker crossovers. I don't know your exact process and there are many factors to take into account (nature of raw materials and product, process steps, work flows etc), but it can be feasible under careful examination.

Regards!

Greetings Dawnmo,

 

Having done the risk assessement is a good start, depending on what you have taken into consideration. You do have to care for your employees health during work.

If it is an RTE product there is generally small room for workarounds, compared to others. If it is a fully closed sytem you can be less strict. However, you can "dissect" the production line to something like high risk - low risk.

A rough scenario could be that reception (heavy lifting) could be more lax than when the raw material is on the production line and especially if there is a kill step, then from that point and until the product is packed you can't allow rolled up sleeves. After packaging you could be lax again (heavy lifitng again), provided there are no worker crossovers. I don't know your exact process and there are many factors to take into account (nature of raw materials and product, process steps, work flows etc), but it can be feasible under careful examination.

 

Regards!

Thank you for your response, we are low risk, processing raw vegetables and pack them into 10kg polythene bags ready for further processing by our customers. it is the packing and transferring the bags into pallets at a fast pace, is where the staff are struggling with the heat.   

I'm going to ask why your fresh veg packhouse isn't refrigerated?  

Aside from that, IMO there is no issue with pushing sleeves up

Although we don't allow this at our facility, I have seen dairy processing plants where the employees wear short sleeve shirts as their production uniform.

The team must also wash their forearms instead of only their hands. 

I'd start with diving into why your staff has to wear long sleeves in the first place.  Most plants will have uniforms with sleeves to protect food from employee contamination.  There are many things that can come to mind, but I've even had an auditor ask you how you control arm hair if they're working with exposed food.  But once you've reviewed what risks you're concerned about that prompted long sleeves to begin with, you can look to mitigate the risk into allowing exposed arms.  Specific GMP retraining to make sure open wounds or bandaids don't become exposed, washing the forearms during handwashing to ensure the skin is clean, etc.  I've successfully defended programs where employees only wore long sleeve tunics in a production room but the warehouse personnel didn't need to wear them because everything in the warehouse was sealed.

I'll expand to say that rolling sleeves on it's own becomes an additional hazard.  Those folded sleeves become a harborage point, material can get stuck in the folds, and it makes it impossible to see whether the uniform has been soiled to the point of needing to be changed (as I'm imagining a worker rolling up his sleeves in the morning and leaving them rolled each time they remove the uniform to take a break).  If you manage to justify short sleeves in this environment, you should really consider purchasing short sleeved uniforms for them to use.  Rolling the sleeves will also look like the employee is wearing the uniform incorrectly, drawing extra attention from auditors and leading them to scrutinize the choice you've made more heavily.