Face Fit Testing

MECsafe are a fully trained provider and are able to deliver qualitative face-fit testing for your employees, which can be undertaken on-site, at your premises or at our training centre.  

If you provide respiratory protective equipment (RPE) to your employees then it is essential that you have documentary evidence to show the RPE fits the wearer. By subjecting each wearer to a face-fit test you can be sure that your organisation is fulfilling the requirements laid out in the Health & Safety Executives (HSE) guidance note HSE 282/28. This is increasingly becoming an area of focus during HSE Site Inspections with fines being issued through FFI (Fee for Intervention).

What does the Face-Fit Test Involve?

The HSE information document 282/28 recommends that Fit Testing procedures should comprise a series of 7 exercises which should be performed for at least one minute each. The wearer must achieve an individual pass result in each of the 7 test exercises within one single testing period. ie if a single one of the exercises fails then the whole test must be repeated. The minimum time required to conduct one face-fit test to include purging and ambient sampling time is 15 minutes with additional time required for training users how to use their mask.

The recommended fit testing exercises for both Qualitative and Quantitative tests are:

• Normal Breathing
• Deep Breathing
• Head Side to Side
• Head Up and Down
• Bending
• Grimace (excluded from overall result)
• Talking
• Normal Breathing

Please contact us for more information on our 'Train the Trainer' course, which will enable you to test your colleagues' masks.  

Please contact us for availability.