Introduction
People in an industrial environment interact with machines which are structured to slit, drill, stitch, cut, staple, shear, chip, and punch materials which are mostly metals. Most of these machines are movable power driven machines either through manual or automated operations. When not carefully used and when safety rules are not followed while using these machines, themachines can cause a number of injuries which are referred to as mechanical injuries. Basically, the machines operators run a risk of experiencing similar kind of treatment that was intended for the materials used by the machine that include slit, shear, punch and stitch among others if the operation and safety procedures are not carefully followed. The most common forms of mechanical injuries include tearing and cutting, mostly hands and fingers, shearing, crushing, puncturing, spraining and straining (Buckwalter, n.d.).
Common Types of Mechanical Injuries
A strain is a mechanical injury which occurs when muscles are torn or overstretched. Spain on the other hand is a mechanical injury which occurs from torn joint ligaments. A cut happens when a when a body part get into interaction with a sharp edge. Tearing or cutting seriousness relies on the damage created to muscles, skin, veins bones or arteries. The most common mechanical cut includes complete fingers cut or hand cut. Most companies have power-driven shears used for cutting plastic, metal, paper, composites and elastomers. Such machines frequently amputate hands & fingers when operators get under the cutting blade and trigger the blade prior to removing the hand fully.
Crushing injuries take place when a body part is jammed between hard surfaces which move together progressively, crushing everything between them. There are two forms of crushing which include run-in points and squeeze-point types. Run-in point risks happen when two objects come increasingly closer together. In this case, one object must be rotating. Squeeze-pint risks happen when two hard services; where one is moving move close together enough to crush any object placed between them. Beside this, parts of the body can as well be crushed in different ways which include hitting fingers with a hammer or a heavy object dropping on a foot (Etshare, 2011).
Machines utilized to bend engineering materials in different manners can break or fracture the bones. Operators of these machines can get different kinds of fractures. These include simple fracture which involves a break which does not prick the skin, compound fracture which is a break which causes breakage of the surrounding skin and tissues. They can also cause a complete fracture that break the impacted bone into two or more different pieces, other forms of fractures include incomplete fracture where the affected bone is left in one piece though cracked, transverse fracture where the bone experience straight break. An oblique fracture causes a diagonal break, and comminuted fracture causes broken bone into various small pieces at the fracture point. Puncturing is a form of mechanical injury that takes place when an object straight penetrates into the body and then pulls out straight. This results to a wound in the penetrating object shape. Mechanical injuries can sometimes be very severe. In this regard, the machine operators should consider employing all safety measures to ensure safety and to minimize mechanical injuries (Buckwalter, n.d.).
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