As a medical professional, you’re used to working in the trenches, and by trenches, we mean bedpans, sponge baths, and surgery cleanup. Your family members may think your job title is fancy, but you know the truth; sometimes, it’s downright dirty.
You’re probably already wearing safety goggles when you need to or getting constant reminders from your higher-ups to make sure you’re wearing the right eye protection. If you wear corrective lenses, keeping your eyes safe can be a serious chore.
Luckily, the days of stuffing your regular eyewear under protective safety glasses are long gone. Just like customizable scrubs, you can now have your very own prescription protective eyewear. We’ll explain what it is, why you need it, and who makes the best (hint: It’s 100% Stoggles).
Safety Glasses: Your Vision’s Hero
Not all heroes wear capes, but we like to envision our safety eyewear with tiny capes attached to the lenses, flying in to protect your eyes and spare your vision. Safety glasses are a critical piece of PPE for all individuals who work in the healthcare industry.
Here’s why.
- Splashes, spills, and splatters. Although you’d like to assume that the only thing you’ll be splashing or splattering is your morning coffee, it’s more likely going to be some type of bodily fluid. We’ll let you use your imagination, but choosing to change a catheter without a pair of high-quality safety glasses is 0/10 recommended.
- Patients. You love them, you care for them, and inevitably, they try to bite or hit you. Combative patients can flail a limb directly into your face causing blunt force trauma that could potentially cost you your vision. Protective glasses prevent them from delivering their punches and kicks to your eye socket.
- UV light. You’re around it more than you realize, even though you just pulled a 48-hour zombie shift and feel like you never left your wing of the hospital. Medical facilities routinely use UV lamps to disinfect and prevent the spread of germs. Additionally, many patient treatments involve the use of ultraviolet light.
- Blue light. Blue light is similar to UV light. It’s emitted from the sun but also from LED light bulbs, televisions, computer screens, and tablets. You may be used to wearing a face shield in surgery, but unless it’s coated with blue light-blocking material, your eyes are vulnerable to this intrusive light.
You know occupational safety is essential, and safety glasses are part of the getup. Thankfully, prescription safety glasses prevent you from having to wear double glasses when it’s time to suit up.
Why Prescription Safety Glasses Are Important
If you’re a prescription eyewear wearer, you’ve probably had to use protective goggles over your regular glasses a few times. Not only is this incredibly uncomfortable, but it’s also not exactly safe. Trying to see through two separate lenses that can potentially fog makes it hard to concentrate on your work (or safely assist your patient on and off the toilet).
And, can we just say that with whatever you’re doing, feeling confident is a big part of that. Especially when there is a clear and better alternative. Looking like a cast member of Grey’s Anatomy while you’re performing your third pancreatectomy of the day isn’t feasible. But you can still feel like that — and we all know that’s what matters most.
Prescription safety goggles may be necessary if you need protection from airborne pathogens, but for the rest, you need prescription safety glasses. These glasses are designed with the exact same safety features as your standard OSHA-required safety glasses, but with the benefit of having your own prescription.
Comfort
There’s no denying it; you need to be comfortable at work. When you are, you’re a better caregiver, and your patients receive better care. Instead of worrying about fitting your eyeglasses underneath safety frames, you can make do with a single pair of lightweight glasses. (And who’s to say comfort can’t include looking trendy?)
Better Protection
When faced with the option of wearing uncomfortable safety glasses over our regular frames, most of us are going to just opt out every single time. Sure, we’re playing Russian roulette with our vision, but most of us don’t go to work expecting an accident to happen.
Having prescription safety eyewear provides better protection because it’s protection you’ll actually wear, and you’ll want to wear it.
Show Me the Data
If you’re still not sold on wearing protective eyewear, don’t take it from us; look at the statistics.
- Over 300,000 workers (just like you) end up in the emergency room with an eye-related injury every single year.
- Eye injuries make up 45% of head injuries that cause a person to miss work.
- Nurses are taking the hits (hard). They are the most exposed of any healthcare workers to BBFEs (blood and bodily fluid exposures).
- Over 80% of the BBFEs nurses endure are to their faces, and more than 60% of those are a direct hit to the eyes.
- The CDC says that more than 90% of these eye injuries are completely preventable simply by wearing protective safety eyewear.
The risks are real, and your vision is priceless. The design of the eyes and retinal cells means that if you get an injury, you could permanently lose your vision.
If you want to make sure you leave work behind when you go home (and don’t return to the ER on your personal time), wearing eye protection is an absolute must.
The Best Medical Prescription Safety Glasses
We’re not saying prescription safety glasses are going to make it to the top of your wish list this year, but they’re definitely on the short list of must-have work items.
Here’s what you should look for in every single pair you buy:
Top and Side Shields
Prescription safety glasses usually come in one of two style categories: wraparound lenses or side and top shields. Wraparound lenses have lenses that wrap around the sides of your face to protect your temples, whereas regular eyeglasses leave your eyes vulnerable.
While these might be the best option for superheroes with laser vision, they’re a bad choice for someone with corrective lenses. The wraparound style warps your corrective prescription, which can alter your vision and make it seem like you’re a little too familiar with the contents of the Pyxis machine.
A better choice are side and top shields. Not only do these offer protection at the top of your rimless safety glasses (near your eyebrow) they don’t interfere with your prescription. As a side note, they also don’t make you look like an insect, which is arguably a huge selling point.
Also, can we brag for a moment? Yeah, we know #humblebrag is so 2010, but we can’t help but share that we basically invented side and top shields in safety eyewear. We get that no one wants to look like a bug (except maybe on Halloween), but everyone wants to stay protected from mysterious liquids and fog (especially on Halloween).
It’s a no-brainer now, but way back when in ye ‘ol days of eyewear, it wasn’t really a thing. We added side and top shields because, with prescription lenses, you deserve to have protection + style — no compromises.
The side and top shields are what give Stoggles our signature look; it’s the “Yeah, they’re Stoggles” moment as you flip your hair on the runway or at emergency room triage.
Anti-Fog
You know the fog drill; put on glasses, put on the rest of your PPE, take off glasses to wipe them, and put glasses back on. Rinse and repeat about 1,000 times per day. Taking your safety glasses off is dangerous because you’re risking your eyes to the external threats your glasses are protecting them from.
Plus, if you have RX safety glasses, taking off your prescription lenses is potentially doubly dangerous. Now, your eyes are unprotected and you can’t see.
Instead of trying anti-fog wipes or drops, which only protect you from getting steamy for a few hours, go for anti-fog-coated lenses, like the ones available in every pair of Stoggles.
Stoggles are dipped in anti-fog coating to create a long-lasting shield against fogging. No matter how many times you mask up, take a sneeze or cough to the face, or enter a freezing cold OR, you’ll never have to worry about fogging up. And, unlike the anti-fog spray, our lens coating is a dip solution for a smoother finish that lasts.
Impact Resistance
Protect yourself from flying bedpans, operative devices, and patients with the durability of ANSI Z87.1-2020 certified safety eyewear. The American National Standards Institute works with agencies like OSHA to ensure the safety standards for workers across multiple industries.
The ANSI Z87.1-2020 certification ensures your eyewear protects you against strikes and hits from objects of certain weights and at certain speeds. You can tell if your glasses are ANSI certified by looking for the ANSI seal on the frame of your glasses.
Just so you know, all Stoggles are ANSI rated because we don’t play when it comes to flying bedpans.
UV Protection
Safety glasses don’t have to have a tint to provide UV protection. Polycarbonate, the ultra-lightweight and super durable material that we use to craft our Stoggles, is naturally UV blocking and provides crystal clear lenses.
Polycarbonate lenses offer UV protection and a sturdy, anti-scratch surface so that your glasses last as long as your ongoing shifts.
Blue Light Protection
One of the most important specs you can have on any pair of safety glasses is blue light filtration. Blue light blockers protect your eyes from intrusive blue light from every blue light source.
Whether you’re spending hours charting or sitting under LED lighting waiting for the next broken bone to enter the ER, your eyes are protected.
Stoggles: The Rx for Your Eyes
In addition to comfort and style, Stoggles offers the best prescription safety glasses, and we create them in-house. No sending away for lenses and reconfiguring them back at the lab. We do it all in one fell swoop to save you time, money, and headache.
Not to mention, with frame styles like stylish aviator and cat-eye, you can transition from the lab to a night out on the town (but you’ll still probably need to shower first).
You’ve got patients; we’ve got protection. Keep your eyes safe and your face feeling comfortable with the industry-leading safety eyewear that’s designed keeping prescription lens wearers in mind, ensuring that we deliver that great feeling and experience with every pair of Stoggles.
Sources:
UV Lights and Lamps: Ultraviolet-C Radiation, Disinfection, and Coronavirus | FDA
90% of Workplace Eye Injuries Could be Lessened or Prevented With Safety Eyewear Use| ISHN
