Let’s say Health and Safety training is like sending your employees to work after a big bowl porridge, or a cool drink of energy vitamins – it’s you but on a good day. OK, so no one’s likely to be jumping around singing about their forecasting reports, but it does give your business a vital boost of vitamins to the immune system. A company that has protected itself from accident or damage to its employees’ health, is a business protected from the financial consequences and time penalties of people off work, damage to buildings or products and the material costs associated therein. In many cases, these costs are not covered by insurance and can leave companies highly vulnerable. To highlight the importance of taking your H&S vitamins, The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) Annual Report for 2017/2018 states that 30.7 million work days were lost due to work-related ill health and non-fatal workplace injuries.
Health and Safety by law
So, whether your business revolves around use of dangerous manual machinery or more simply working with display screen equipment, your company is required by law to protect all employees under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, as well as adhere to The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999. In brief, this means all organisations must conduct a thorough risk assessment of their business and do everything ‘reasonably practicable’ to ensure the safety of all staff members. This involves having a clear Health and Safety policy with a robust system of procedures and competent representatives in place who can impart, monitor, control and review all preventative measures to any risks identified within your business.
Training for health
While appointing a responsible individual is a great start towards comprehensive Health and Safety Policy, it is vital that all information is filtered through to all staff. It is the legal duty of an organisation to provide instruction, training and supervision to all employees, allowing them to carry out their jobs safely. Not only does this equip your staff to spot potential hazards and avoid them, it fosters a positive culture of care and concern as well as avoiding the pain, anguish and financial costs that injury and ill health can cause. Do you have all aspects of health and safety covered? Indeed it is often small to medium businesses that are more vulnerable than larger organisations with regards to Health and Safety Law.
If you are unsure whether you are fully complying to Health and Safety Law, or are concerned that your policy is not robust enough or that it’s being communicated effectively, the good news is that there is now a lot of help and guidance online. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE – hse.gov.uk) offers plenty of advice and free downloadable guidance leaflets on the essentials of Health and Safety at Work.
Nimble Courses
Elearning courses, and this is the bit where we come in, are proving a more and more popular way of communicating your Health and Safety policies to your company. Courses that have been developed in conjunction with industry professionals or leading authorities in Health and Safety Law, mean that you can be reassured that you have the basics of the Health and Safety Act and Health and Safety at Work Regulations covered within the specifics of your industry.
At Nimble Elearning, we provide a wide range of professionally-led, Health and Safety courses covering topics that range from workstation assessments to legislation and compliance. Our courses are highly engaging and we include a free Nimble Author licence to easily edit your courses so you can update, adapt and rebrand your course as your company requirements dictate. The courses are all instructionally designed to deliver maximum learning impact in a highly digestible and interactive way. They also allow you to monitor whether your staff are completing or using the training at any given point.
If you have the resources to create your own Health and Safety courses in-house, you may still be interested in using our super-easy course authoring tool Nimble Author. Indeed, one of our customers DFDS Seaways, big in the safety arena, are using Nimble Author to create their own safety modules and have been delighted with Nimble Author to date. Health and Safety Manager at Dover, Russell Challenor says:
“We have found Nimble Author so simple to use, the flexibility of it means you can change something immediately and it can be used for all sorts of training topics, it’s brilliant and we highly recommend it! The support is also excellent.”
If you would like to take a closer look at our Health and Safety and legislation and compliance courses, please contact us on +44(0)1453 823029 or email us info@nimble-elearning.com.
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