Choosing Essential Health and Safety Training For a Safer Workplace

Over 200 people are killed each year in accidents at work, and over 1million people are injured. Workplace injuries are not just a feature of dangerous environments, but every workplace across the world. A basic essential health and safety training course will give workers an understanding of how to prevent themselves, other workers and others who enter the workplace from suffering illness or injury. As an employer, it is also your legal duty to protect the health and safety of employees, and failing to create a safe working environment can be breaking the law.

A basic safety course enables you to ensure everybody in your workplace remains safe and healthy. Basic safety training will cover the essential factors in a number of areas, making it an easy option for managers wanting to maintain a good working environment.

The key areas you should look for in an essential health and safety training programme are the following;

Fire awareness

Manual handling

Display screen equipment training

Slips trips and falls preventio

These areas are the most common causes of workplace accidents, and should therefore be covered in a basic safety training course. The training should encourage employees to be aware of hazards which may occur in your workplace, and encourage them to do something about them if they do identify hazards. This is effectively done by giving students a risk assessment.

A good general health and safety programme will be able to be completed at different times, rather than all in one go when a student may not be concentrating for the full length of time.

Online and CD-ROM based courses offer this advantage.

To track the learning progress of employees, it is often useful if the employer has access to an easy-to-understand tool to measure progress. This way, you are able to ensure that staff are completing their training effectively. To help you meet health and safety legal registrations, it may help to have certificates to prove that employees have received their essential health and safety training.

A good basic safety course will use a number of teaching methods, perhaps including videos, text, images and encouraging interaction. Everybody learns information in different ways, so it is best to choose an essential health and safety course which uses a variety of teaching techniques. Again, CD-ROM and web based courses are usually the only basic safety courses which offer this flexibility. They also allow for unlimited use, so are much more economical and cost-effective as they can be used to train other staff in the future too.