About Bespak by Recipharm and its training with iHASCO

Bespak by Recipharm partnered with iHASCO over a decade ago as a means of supplying its staff with Health & Safety and HR Compliance training. The partnership with iHASCO started when training courses were undertaken via CD-ROMs! Fast forward 10 years and Bespak by Recipharm now uses a wide range of our Health & Safety and HR Compliance eLearning courses, including Fire Awareness, COSHH, and Mental Health Awareness, to keep staff safe, informed, and productive.

We caught up with Sarah Fleetwood, EHS Specialist at Bespak by Recipharm, to discuss workplace safety and training at the organisation and why it is important for them to supply staff with high-quality training...

  • Sector: Manufacturing
  • Founded: 1959
  • No. of employees: 600+
  • Location: Norfolk, United Kingdom

Why is it important for you to give your staff high-quality training?

At Bespak by Recipharm, our mantra is ‘Safe By Choice, Not By Chance’ and our aim is ‘Zero Harm’ – great catchy straplines that catch the eye on posters and documents, but our challenge as a safety team is how we give our colleagues the best information, training, and education to ensure they transfer this learning to actively and consistently choose safe ways of working…every single time. When you have a well-informed workforce who truly understand that both their safety and that of their colleagues is a common goal, the benefits speak for themselves.

Adversely, if we deliver a poor-quality standard of education and instruction, along with inconsistent or mixed messaging, the output is a confused workforce and a culture where safety is not always a priority.

What made you choose iHASCO as your provider? Did anything stand out above all else?

Having worked in health and safety for many years, I have seen a plethora of training videos; some good that I still remember today but the vast majority were dull and unengaging.

What we really liked with iHASCO was the combination of presenting, on-screen graphics, and the test at the end and how the presenters are engaging but don’t distract from the learning. I cannot talk highly enough about our dedicated Account Manager, Rachel Elsdon; she clearly values her customers and works hard to maintain a great relationship with them - nothing has been too much trouble for Rachel.

What are your favourite features about iHASCO?

It is so easy to navigate around the platform and the dashboard is brilliant for showing the overall status of our training. The ability to set our own pass marks for the courses is a useful feature, although we usually set everything to 100%! We purchased the add-on feature which allows us to link relevant internal training documents and whilst we don’t make the most of this feature now, this will evolve as we bring more courses onto our platform.

During the coronavirus pandemic, having our iHASCO training platform has been a tremendous benefit. For example, fire training has always been difficult to undertake, in terms of time and general coordination. Our COVID- safe ways of working challenged our thinking. We couldn’t, given the prevailing conditions, host a trainer on-site to deliver a cost effective and content effective training programme. iHASCO’s online fire awareness/extinguisher training was the perfect solution. By using this we not only delivered training to an additional 51 people safely, but we also saved valuable resources(over an hour of time per person). A win-win all round and to boot our colleagues rated this course 4 out of 5 possible stars; preferring this approach much more than the previous training method. 

Our next steps are to roll out online DSE training for our colleagues who are working from home. Like other companies, last year we moved many of our office-based team to work from home. This resulted in the H&S team having to review 200+ paper assessments, again time and resource consuming. This online offering with the built-in assessment will make this process much easier and more efficient.