• The fundamental principle is that personal protective equipment (PPE) should only be used as a last resort.
• The safety and health of employees must be first safeguarded by measures to eliminate workplace risks at source, through technical or organisational means (e.g by substituting hazardous chemical ) or by providing protection on a collective basis (e.g providing scaffolding instead of harnesses).
• Collective protective measures covering numbers of employees in a workplace must have priority over protective measures applying to individual employees.
• If these measures are not sufficient, only then should PPE be used to protect against the hazards that are unavoidable.