BEFORE AND AFTER

We offer this before and after study for all you do it yourselfers and wanna be do it yourselfers out there in industrial first aid land.

Begin with a physical inventory using the “First Aid Inventory Worksheet” which you can download and print here.

Take this form to your first aid kit locations and do a physical inventory. Pay special attention to the eight highlighted items on the worksheet. (Your guide to the ANSI minimum standard)

Toss out the empties and check the expiration dates on any sprays, ointments, eye washes, tablets and wipes. These items will be clearly marked with the pull dates and if you are beyond those dates, toss the item, if not keep it. (If you have a lot of a particular item left over that is out of date, it may be an indication that you don’t need or use this item. So maybe you don’t want to replace it.) Get some feedback from your people when in doubt.

Once you have tossed the empties and the expired products it is time to take stock. Refer to your worksheet and start on the left-hand side and work your way down. The first group of products are the emergency first aid products and you should consider having at least one of each. Again, pay attention to the highlighted items as those products represent the minimum requirement in that category.

Proceed down the left-hand side of the worksheet checking to make sure you have those bases covered.

These groups have been organized into recognizable categories, adhesive bandages, antiseptics, gauze & tape, burn treatment, eye care, ice packs, instruments, finger cots and tablets. The idea is to make selections from each group that make the most sense for your operation making sure that you cover the minimums mentioned above.

Use this worksheet as a guide or a template. Not everything on this list is needed, necessary or going to fit into your first aid cabinet. The idea is that you cover the required items for regulatory compliance and select the balance based on what you will actually use. We offer this worksheet as is because we have been using it for more that 20 years. What appears on this very refined list is what was actually experienced by our people in the field with real customers over many years serving the industrial first aid market.

The items on this list represent the vast majority of the items that actually get used in the workplace and so we put them here in one place in generic language so that you won’t have to reinvent the process. This is not rocket science and of course it doesn’t cover every circumstance for every business. In the event you want to or are compelled to have additional first aid items on hand, then please go ahead and add them to your list.

A word on the tablets. We put them last on the list because many of our business customers over the years did not want to offer any medications of any kind in their first aid kit. We respect their decisions and if you do not care to offer them to your people, we are 100% OK with that.

We would have you consider that we offer a line of tablets that are of generic time proven formulas that have been used as over the counter medications for many years. Many of these are available in tamper resistant industrial packaging and come with written instructions on the self-dispensing packages.

Providing even a limited selection of tablets properly packaged may be preferable to an open bottle stashed away in drawer.