Health and safety in the workplace: the need for on-going training
Some things in business remain relatively static. A manager who purchases a new point of sale system, for example, can reasonably expect that one good training session for all employees will last the life of the system as long as any new hires are brought up to speed. The same cannot be said for health and safety training in the workplace. It needs to be an on-going affair.
Regulations change over time
Health and safety regulations are the result of complex interactions across the nation. These involve not those who exercise government oversight, but also industry groups and at times, individual workers who can offer salient real-world experience regarding work conditions and health and safety.
Because regulations tend to shift over time, it is not possible to simply teach workers any single set of standards and expect those to last for an unlimited time. The vast bulk of safety needs tends to have a certain amount of permanence, but the UK Health and Safety Executive is continuously refining existing regulations or adding new ones. In the last month alone, HSE has issued two new health and safety bulletins.
Human memory
Employees who use a point of sale system are unlikely to forget details of its operations. Because they are constantly accessing the system, they remain intimately familiar with it. Health and safety issues, however, can be more like first aid knowledge. Managers responsible for conducting risk assessments probably perform the task on a relatively infrequent basis. While it is to be hoped that safety will always be a top concern, the reality of a working environment often means that managers have many other issues clamouring for their attention. It is therefore an excellent idea to provide managers and workers with refresher courses to help more effectively retain knowledge of important health and safety requirements.
Winter & Company offers both generalized and specific risk assessment courses to assist in this process. Speciality areas include such topics as fire risks and access for the disabled.
