HAV is vibration which can reach your hands when you are working with hand held power tools, such as chainsaws, or hand-guided machinery such as buffing machines, or when holding materials which are being processed by machinery. HAV can cause damage to your blood circulatory system, vibration white finger (VWF) often occurs when fingers or the body are cold or wet, initially finger tips become white.
They may become numb and you may get ‘pins and needles’. It can camage to nerves, causing reduction in sense of touch and temperature, and possibly permanent numbness or tingling in your fingers and damage to muscles, bones and joints You may notice loss of strength in you hands and pain in your wrists and arms. You may have difficulty in picking up small objects such as screws or nails.
The risk depends on a number of factors including:
To protect you workers HAV testing is essential. We can carry out testing at one of our test centres, if it is not practical to release your tools we have trained mobile testing engineers who can visit your site and carry out testing in a controlled environment. We have adopted a traffic light tagging system and apply durable tags showing tool ID, vibration level and exposure points.
