The world of health and safety can be a minefield. The amount information available to organisations online can often be overwhelming, leaving employers unsure what training is essential for them to provide to their staff.

Failing to meet Health and Safety requirements can have devastating impacts for workers and businesses. For workers, the right health and safety training can prevent life-changing injuries whilst at work. For businesses, health and safety failures can have serious knock-affects in the form of heavy fines and damage to reputation.

In today’s blog, we look at eight of the most important training courses that all organisations need to provide for their staff to ensure the safety of workers and reduce risk of financial damage:

1. Manual Handling

Manual Handling is the technical term given to lifting and moving heavy objects. Even if you are not working in a physically demanding job role, every working environment will involve some form of manual handling, from moving boxes, furniture or heavy equipment.

It might not seem like a particularly dangerous action, but over a third of workplace injuries come as direct result of manual handling. Poor manual handling can result in huge strain on the muscles, which in extreme cases can lead musculoskeletal disorders. These can cause immense pain and severely compromise quality of life to sufferers. To prevent workers from suffering these issues at work, Manual Handling training is a legal requirement for all employers.

This ESS-provided Manual Handling course is an intensive 3-hour course which shows learner the simple steps they need to take in order lift safely and reduce their risk of workplace injury. They are given practical experience going through the lifting process on showing how this will protect your body from strain.

Course page: https://essentialsiteskills.co.uk/course/manual-handling 

2. Risk Assessment Training

Risk assessments are key part of health and safety awareness for any workplace. The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 specifies that any organisation of 5 or more staff needs to be carrying out written risk assessments. While this task might sound overwhelming, for most working environments this process should be fairly straight-forward.

Risk assessments are usually carried out by senior members of the business such as managers or supervisors. The details of what will be contained within these assessments will depend on the specifics of the organisation, with more dangerous workplaces needing more thorough analysis. As the Act states, companies should assess risks and hazard “so far as is reasonably predictable”.

To this end, our Risk Assessment Training course is a streamlined, half day course that provides learners with the essential knowledge of how to apply the legal requirements of risk assessments to their workplace. Delegates will develop key techniques in identifying risks and how to manage them in a formal manner.

Course page: https://essentialsiteskills.co.uk/course/risk-assessment-training 

3. Fire Safety Awareness

In the wake of the Grenfell tower disaster, the importance of fire safety awareness is at the forefront of employer’s minds more than ever. The Fire Safety Order of 2005 means that employers have a legal responsibility to provide fire safety training to all employees upon employment.

Ensuring all members of staff, no matter their position, have a basic understanding of fire prevention and how to react in the event of fire. This can be a lifesaver. This ESS course covers all the essential information staff need to know in order to reduce the risk of fire-related injury or fatality. It includes sections on:

• The common causes of fire
• Fire prevention
• The behaviour of fire
• What to do if a fire breaks out
• How to use fire extinguishers
• Emergency evacuation procedures

For learners who want a specific session to be trained just on operating fire extinguishers, we provide a shortened course focusing solely on using the equipment.

Course page: https://essentialsiteskills.co.uk/course/fire-safety-awareness 

4. Fire Marshal/ Warden

As well as providing all staff with basic fire safety awareness training, the Fire Safety Order specifies that business must have a designated fire marshal (also known as a fire warden). Legally, organisations must have enough fire wardens to effectively carry out emergency evacuation procedures, including cover for staff absence and leave.

In addition to the knowledge covered by the Fire Safety Awareness course, marshals also must have the additional training in how to identify and amend fire hazards in the workplace, co-ordinate staff in the event of evacuation and perform regular checks and reviews. The Fire Marshal/ Warden course provided by ESS covers all of the necessary information required for this role, including how to conduct effective fire drills and risk assessments, in a streamlined half-day session.

Course page: https://essentialsiteskills.co.uk/course/fire-marshal-warden 

5. First Aid at Work

According to the Health and Safety Act of 1981, all workplaces need to provide ‘adequate and appropriate first aid equipment, facilities and people’ in the event of first aid being required. This legislation is deliberately kept quite vague as what is ‘adequate and appropriate’ will vary significantly depending on the working environment.

Regardless of the specifics of each workplace, they need a point of contact to handle first aid situations in an emergency. Ensuring first aiders are in place at an organisation is a legal requirement for employers and significant fines can be given for failing to meet their responsibilities. Current advice from the HSE recommends companies have at least one first aider per 50 employees.

ESS’s First Aid at Work course provides all the basics needed for anyone training to be a designated first aider. This encompasses a whole range of practical and theoretical first aid responsibilities from assessing and handling incidents, to ensuring the right practises are in place.

For those who do not need to complete the full First Aid at Work course, we also provide an Emergency First Aid at Work course. This shorter training focuses on emergency health and safety protocol, such as how to respond to choking, bleeding or casualties requiring CPR. All these topics are also covered as part of the full First Aid in Work course.

Course page: https://essentialsiteskills.co.uk/course/first-aid-work

6. Mental Health First Aid

While most workplaces understand the importance of physical first aid, people are less familiar with Mental Health First Aid.

A significant portion of work-related absence is a direct result of mental health issues such as depression, anxiety or stress. Not only can these be horrible experiences for the individual affected, they can have serious financial repercussions for business. Figures from HSE found that 12.8 million working days were lost due to mental health issues in 2018/19, with 44% of work-related illness relating to depression or anxiety.

To help workers suffering mental health issues in the workplace, staff need the right training. Our Mental Health First Aid course provides learners with the necessary knowledge to approach these sensitive issues and provide the right support for individuals to put them on the best path to recovery.

While it is not yet a legal requirement like physical first aid, there are on-going discussions being made in Government in making Mental Health First Aid mandatory. To learn more about our Mental Health First Aid course, see our previous blog entry which we released to coincide with the Time to Talk campaign.

Course page: https://essentialsiteskills.co.uk/course/mental-health-first-aid-mhfa

7. NEBOSH Safety Simplified

NEBOSH are one of the most highly respected awarding bodies for occupational health and safety. Their name is a seal of approval meaning you can rely on their course to be of high quality and up to the latest industry standards. To learn more about NEBOSH and their training course, check out our blog which takes a closer look at the awarding body.

As the name suggests, the NEBOSH Safety Simplified is great introduction to the basics of managing health and safety risks in the workplace. Regardless of their occupation or previous skill level, learners will get a useful oversight into how to create a culture of health and safety in the workplace.  

The course is designed to be as proactive and engaging as possible. It even incorporates cutting-edge Augmented Reality to engage workers with their learning in unique ways. Over this three-day course, delegates will cover topics such as:

• The benefits of managing Health and Safety
• How to undertake Health and Safety Risk Assessments and put in place appropriate control measures
• Recognise and control common workplace hazards
• How to help prevent the recurrence of incidents
• The purpose of inspection and audits

This course is not a legal requirement like the First Aid or Fire Safety courses, but ensuring all staff receive this training is excellent investment and can be vital in ensuring worker safety.

Course page: https://essentialsiteskills.co.uk/course/nebosh-safety-simplified 

8. IOSH Working Safely

To protect your workers, it is integral to establish a culture of health and safety at organisations. An efficient way to help achieve this goal is to provide staff training from our suite of IOSH courses. In particular, the Working Safely course.

Working Safely is a high-impact programme designed to engage learners with health and safety training. There is a lot of cross-over between this and the NEBOSH Safety Simplified course in terms of content. However, Working Safely is even more streamlined, taking place over a single day.

The course provides learners with a condensed overview of health, safety and environmental basics within a single, self-contained session. It covers the basics of:

• Occupational safety and health
• Defining and identifying common hazards and risks
• Improving safety performance

IOSH one of the leading awarding bodies in the field of workplace health and safety. As well as this training, ESS also provide other IOSH courses to suit the specifics needs of staff members of different job roles, responsibilities and levels of seniority:

• IOSH Leading Safely
• IOSH Managing Safely
• IOSH Managing Occupational Health & Wellbeing

Again, none of the above courses are a legal requirement for organisations, but they are a great way of ensuring your organisations is meeting its obligations to protect staff from the various risks at work.

Course page: https://essentialsiteskills.co.uk/course/iosh-working-safely 

Further training

Depending on the specifics of your business, workers may well need additional training in order to operate certain machinery or work in dangerous environments legally and safely. To see a full list of list of the training we provide via our course index. We also provide a range of e-learning courses which can be completed online across a whole range of topics.