While serious hand injuries among oil and gas workers can be life-changing, they are often easily preventable or can be mitigated through appropriate protection and hazard controls.
Hand injuries remain one of the most persistent safety challenges across oil and gas operations, particularly in complex, high-risk environments such as offshore rigs, refineries, and LNG facilities.
Despite Australia’s comparatively low injury rate, Safe Work Australia recorded 188 traumatic workplace fatalities in 2024 and more than 146,000 serious compensation claims, with over half of all accepted claims involving upper-limb injuries.
Workers in well servicing and offshore operations face heightened exposure to crush, pinch, impact, and laceration hazards that can result in hospitalisation or amputation.
International data reinforces the scale of the problem.
According to the International Association of Drilling Contractors (IADC), approximately 43 per cent of all incidents on drilling rigs involve hand or finger injuries.
Crush injuries – caused when hands are caught in, on, or between objects – remain among the most severe, particularly when heavy equipment or suspended loads are involved. Impact injuries, often linked to repetitive tasks such as hammering, can lead to fractures, dislocations, and deep tissue damage.
Across these incident types, common root causes include inattention, inadequate risk assessment, rushing, incorrect lifting or force application, and the use of unsuitable tools.
DESIGNING OUT RISKS
A growing body of research supports the shift toward engineering controls and human-factor-focused interventions to reduce hand-related injuries.
For example, advances in glove design now provide impact, cut, puncture, heat, and chemical protection without compromising dexterity, addressing long-standing barriers to consistent use.
At the same time, push-pull tools have become essential for guiding pipes, tubulars, and suspended loads at a safe distance. These tools directly reduce hand-contact exposure and help mitigate the upper-limb strain identified by Safe Work Australia as a major driver of serious claims.
Push-pull tools are only one component of broader no-touch programs now widely implemented across Australian and international operations.
The latest generation of hands-free tools includes devices for gripping, cutting, separating, and holding equipment, keeping workers’ hands away from crush points, pinch points, and suspended loads.
Manufacturers are also increasingly refining these tools using field-based feedback to improve weight balance, durability, and operator control.
Efforts have also focused on increasing worker uptake by ensuring the tools are accessible at the point of use.
This includes developing magnetic tool holders that can be mounted directly at the work area, as well as wearable holders such as clips and pouches, allowing workers to keep tools on their person and reducing the likelihood of non-use due to inaccessibility.
Several organisations have identified hands-free tools as an effective control for reducing hand and finger injuries during pipe handling, lifting, and alignment tasks, with field evaluations showing that these tools significantly reduce line of fire exposures and the need for workers to manually guide tubulars.
Industry guidance also highlights hands-free tools as a critical measure for maintaining distance from suspended loads and preventing hand-contact injuries, with some companies reporting 30 to 50 per cent reductions in hand injuries after adopting no-touch tool programs.
A CASE IN POINT
A safety alert by the International Association of Drilling Contractors highlights the role of push-pull tools in preventing hand and arm injuries.
The alert describes an incident in which a worker’s arm was pinned by pipe-handling equipment during tripping operations.
The injured worker was positioned in the derrick, tying a finger latch open, when the pipe-handling arm unexpectedly moved toward the fingerboard.
With no hands-free tool available to maintain distance, the floorman’s upper arm was caught between the equipment and the tubulars before an “all stop” was called.
The alert identified several contributing factors, including unclear red-zone boundaries, inadequate maintenance of finger latches, and gaps in safety-critical communication.
In this scenario, a push-pull tool would have allowed the floorman to manipulate or stabilise tubulars from a safe distance rather than positioning himself directly on the fingers, where the pipe-handling arm could (and did) travel unexpectedly.
It illustrates that hands-free tools are most effective in situations where workers would otherwise place their hands or arms near moving tubulars, fingerboards, or pipe-handling equipment.