Health and Safety Training - Who Needs it?

Well, the answer is that we ALL do!

Health and safety training is essential, it’s not a matter of simply ticking boxes to get it done, but is vital to protect your company’s greatest asset – your staff!

It’s often simply a matter of raising awareness, changing attitudes and encouraging different behaviour.

And it’s important to choose good, well-balanced training that’s relevant to your company. There’s no law governing the exact contents or level of detail training should include, it’s really up to the person in charge of health and safety in a company to decide what’s right for the staff. So how do you decide? What makes one training programme better than another?

First of all decide what YOU would like to see in the training – after all that will be an easy way of narrowing down training that has been offered to you – if it doesn’t cover it, it’s not right for you!

All training companies should give you a chance to evaluate their courses, otherwise, how can you even start to decide? You may have been given a personal recommendation, but you would still benefit from first-hand experience. So if you are considering a training session with a trainer, invite the trainer in to speak to you and find out how the session is run and details of the contents of the training – maybe you could sit in on a training session if they run open ones? If you are considering using online or computer-based training courses you should be able to test these online or have a disc sent out to you for evaluation. This is a great help in making a decision as you can see the quality and content and make direct comparisons between companies. You will know very quickly if a certain style suits you and if it’s covering what you need.

And when deciding between in-house group sessions, sending staff out to external training or using computer-based interactive training you may want to consider a few things. With group training sessions for example, whether in-house or external, firstly there is the expense, not only of the course, but also the cost of groups of staff being away from their work for a day, or half a day and what do you do about staff who miss the training for some reason? Group training sessions do however have the benefit of lots of interaction between staff.

With computer-based training the courses can usually be completed in-house at a time that suits you and your staff – you have a lot more control. Staff can’t miss the training – it will wait for them! And they also usually have the advantage of being much cheaper! And good training will usually have an easy way of you monitoring who's done what, when they did it and their results in a final test, so you can easily manage the training.

Download our free Health & Safety checklist - a great tool for employers or anyone in charge of Health & Safety! 

Health and Safety at Work Act

The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 (2[1]) states that “It shall be the duty of every employer to conduct his undertaking in such a way as to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health, safety and welfare at work of all his employees.” And the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 (13[2]) require that “…every employer must ensure that their employees are provided with adequate health and safety training.”

A basic set of courses would consist of Fire Awareness training - for everyone, Display Screen Equipment training - for all your computer users, Slips, Trips and Falls Prevention training - again for everyone and Manual Handling training - again good for everyone, even small loads carried badly can be the start of back problems! Stress Awareness training is another useful addition to your general training schedule as stress is the cause of more working days lost than anything else!

Check out our glossary of Health & Safety terms to gain a better understanding of the terminology surrounding Health & Safety.

Keeping your health and safety training up-to-date is important, it’s a legal requirement true, but it’s also essential to the running of your company that your staff are safe and well. The benefits of good health and safety training are enormous. Get started with a free trial of our Health & Safety Online Training today.