The Safety Restock Checklist I Use for Facilities: First Aid Kits, Burn Care, Eye Wash, and Fences

A few years ago, safety supply ordering landed on my desk. I'm an office administrator, not a safety manager. My title says procurement coordination, but the unspoken part of the job is making sure nobody ever has to search for a burn dressing after they've already been burned. That happened exactly once on my watch, in 2021. Once was enough.

If you're the person in your company who gets told to order first aid supplies and you're not sure where to start, this list is for you. It's a five-step checklist I run through before I place a safety order. It fits a mid-size facility with offices, a workshop, and an outdoor yard. If you're running a large construction site or a plant with a full EHS team, you need someone with more training than me.

Step 1: Put first aid kits where the work happens, not just near the coffee

When I took over purchasing in 2020, we had one first aid kit in the break room and one in the front office. I figured that was normal. Then a technician burned his forearm on a hot line in the workshop, and the break-room kit had bandages, ibuprofen, and a splinter tool. Nothing that belonged on a burn.

So now, before I order anything, I walk each area and ask: if someone got hurt right here, what would they need, and how far would they have to go to get it? Checkpoint: if they'd have to walk more than a minute, or go through a set of doors, the kit is in the wrong place.

For office areas and break rooms, we standardized on the First Aid Only 48-piece first aid kit (model FAO-120). It's a small wall-mount kit in a plastic case, and 48 pieces covers the everyday stuff: cuts, scrapes, splinters, minor burns. It's not a trauma bag, and it's not trying to be one. Its job is to be close, visible, and easy to check.

Step 2: Keep a burn care kit where heat and work meet

The 2021 burn taught me something else. A general-purpose first aid kit is not the right tool for a burn. Burns need sterile dressings that won't stick to the skin, and most generic kits just don't carry them.

In the workshop we mounted a First Aid Only burn care kit with plastic case on the wall near the workbench. I specifically wanted the plastic case version. Cardboard cases get soaked with grease, fall apart, and make the supplies inside look like something you'd find under a truck seat. A plastic case wipes clean and shows you at a glance what's missing.

For minor burns, the guidance I keep in the kit says to cool the burn under running water for 10 to 20 minutes, not ice, and cover it with a sterile burn dressing if the skin is blistered or broken. Anything larger than the person's palm, or on the face, hands, or joints, gets medical attention. I'm not a medic; this is just the first-aid step before someone who knows what they're doing takes over.

Checkpoint: can you see the burn care kit from the work area where heat, friction, or electrical work happens? If not, it's too far away.

Step 3: Know how to relieve pepper spray in eyes, and post it before you need it

This step sounds unnecessary until it isn't. In 2023, one of our security officers accidentally discharged his pepper spray during a routine canister check. Another employee nearby caught a face full of it. His first instinct was to rub his eyes hard, which made things worse. Nobody in the building knew the right sequence, including me.

If your workplace has security staff, or anyone who carries pepper spray for parking lot or late-shift protection, this applies. Even if no one does, the same steps cover most chemical splashes that aren't strong enough to require a full hazmat response.

The short version of how to relieve pepper spray in eyes:

• Get the person to fresh air.
• Remove contact lenses as soon as possible.
• Flush the eyes with clean, lukewarm water or sterile saline for 15 to 20 minutes. Hold the eyelids open and let the water run from the inner corner outward.
• Don't rub. Blinking is fine; rubbing pushes the irritant deeper.
• If vision changes, pain gets worse, or flushing doesn't help, get medical care. The U.S. Poison Help line is 1-800-222-1222.

I verified the flush time against the National Capital Poison Center's guidance in January 2025, printed it, and laminated it next to the workshop sink and the eyewash station at the loading dock. Do that before someone needs it, not after.

One compliance note: OSHA's eye flushing rule, 29 CFR 1910.151(b), specifically covers corrosive materials, and pepper spray isn't one. But the logic is the same. When there's a chance someone gets something in their eyes, they shouldn't have to walk far to water. If you install an eyewash station, ANSI Z358.1 is the standard to reference for design and placement.

Step 4: Walk the perimeter. Fences are safety equipment too

Here's the step that doesn't look like it belongs on a first aid checklist. Walk the outside of your building, especially the fence line, at least once a quarter.

When our maintenance lead left in 2022, no one took ownership of the fence for about a year. I only noticed when I was walking the lot with the new operations manager. The split rail fence near the front parking area was missing two rails. It looked like a landscaping problem, but it was a safety problem. That fence's only job was to steer people from the parking lot to the entrance walkway and keep them out of the lane where forklifts operate. With a gap in it, people took the shortcut. A few months after we fixed it, I watched a delivery driver start to duck through the same spot. The only thing that stopped him was the rail we'd repaired.

A split rail fence isn't a security barrier. It's a visual barrier, and that's fine. Its job is to communicate where people should and shouldn't walk. When a rail is missing or rotten, it stops communicating, and that's when someone wanders into an area they shouldn't be in.

An electric fence is a different animal. Along our equipment yard, we have an electric fence, installed to keep trespassers out after hours. If you have one, it needs visible warning signs and an energizer that actually works. We check that vegetation isn't touching the wire, that the charger is running, and that the signs are legible. An unmarked electric fence is worse than no fence at all, because nobody expects it.

Not every site has a split rail fence or an electric fence. The step is the walk and the assignment of ownership, not the specific fence. Checkpoint: if you don't know whose job it is to check the fence line, then there is no owner. Assign one.

Step 5: Keep a restock log, and buy kits you can actually refill

This is the boring step that saves you money. For a long time I bought the cheapest first aid kits I could find, because I figured a kit is a kit. No. The cheap ones were single-use in practice. Use one item out of them, and there was no way to order just that item, so I'd end up buying a whole new box. The effective cost per year was higher, plus I'd have a pile of half-empty plastic boxes in the supply closet.

When I standardized on kits with a model number and available refills, the math changed. The upfront price is not the cheapest, but I can order refills that match the kit's contents, and the contents list on the lid makes it easy to see what's actually missing. Over three years, that's cheaper than replacing the whole kit every time. My rule now: if a kit doesn't have a refill path, I don't buy it.

The other piece is a log. I keep a clipboard next to each kit, or rather, a laminated sheet in the lid, with two columns: date and what got used. Once a quarter, I walk around with a box of refills and restock from those sheets. That's also when I check expiration dates. In 2023 I found a tube of antibiotic ointment in a kit with a 2019 expiration date. Nobody had looked inside that kit in years.

Checkpoint: if you can't tell when a kit was last checked just by looking at it, the check never really happens.

Mistakes I made so you don't have to repeat them

If you take anything from this, avoid these three:

1. One central kit. A single big kit in the break room feels responsible, but it's useless if the injury is on the other side of the building. Put kits close to the risks, and walk the route to prove it works.
2. Buying on sticker price alone. The cheapest kit is only cheap if it can be restocked, documented, and trusted when an injury happens. I learned this the hard way after paying twice for replacement kits that ended up half-empty in a closet.
3. Forgetting the outside of the building. Fences, gates, and signs aren't just maintenance items in another department's budget. They're safety items. If your split rail fence has a gap or your electric fence has a dead charger, it's the same as an empty first aid cabinet. Fix it while it's cheap.

What I'd tell a new person in this role: start with the walk. Walk the inside of the building, then walk the outside. Write down the gaps you find, fix the ones you can, and buy the supplies that match the risks. If you're doing this job for a similar-size company, you don't need to know everything about safety. You just need to be the one who looks, and the one who asks the next question.