Health and Safety
How important is health and safety training in today's workplace?
Health and safety in the workplace has always been an important issue to the majority of business owners, whether that be for compassionate reasons (i.e. they just don't want an employee to get injured), or for financial reasons (they don't want an employee to have time off work with an injury). Whilst your business may have been able to get away with negligence in the past, in today's climate of compensation claims which can sometimes nearly bankrupt a firm, now is more important then ever to take health and safety at work seriously.
What sort of areas does health and safety training cover?
This will really depend on the type of industry your business is engaged in, and also the depth of the health and safety training being provided. Some health and safety courses may provide a general overview of the most common forms of accidents and hazards to health within the workplace such as CoSHH, some will provide varying depths of information on relevant health and safety legislation, whilst others may include practical demonstrations on areas such as correct manual handling. A good and worthwhile health and safety course will combine elements of all these areas. It should also be relevant to your industry (e.g. there's not much point in learning all about office safety if you work on a car assembly line).
Open Course or Bespoke?
When considering an investment in health and safety training for company employees, a manager must decide on whether to put their staff members on an open course or arrange a bespoke health and safety session.
Open Course
An open course is one which is scheduled at a particular training venue and is open to anyone to book onto. Whilst certain courses like the NEBOSH National Diploma qualification may have particular pre-requisites and minimum entry requirements, people from different industries and different job roles will be able to enrol for the training.
An open course is often the cheaper option as opposed to an in-house, bespoke course, however because of the diverse range of job roles and industries of the attending delegates it does mean that some parts of the course syllabus may not be relevant for everyone.
Bespoke Training
Bespoke health and safety training courses are nearly always run in-house - although a venue can normally be arranged by the training provider - and are for a group of employees from the same company. Although an accredited course like those by NEBOSH or IOSH for example will have a set syllabus with little room for tailoring in order to satisfy the requirements and teach delegates the information for passing the assessment(s), a pure bespoke course can be adapted and modified according to the job role, functions and specific hazards and dangers posed by workers from the same organisation. Although often more expensive, this provides maximum benefit from the time for the course attendees, and in fact health and safety training providers like Associated Training and ATC Risk Management who charge a daily training rate rather than a per delegate fee may in fact end up costing less if you have a large number of people requiring training than it would if you were to send them all on an open course.
Related Health and Safety Articles
©2018 UK Business Training. All rights reserved. No part of this website may be copied without permission.