Health and safety: Safety check

David Bryant explains why your staff need health & safety training.

One way to make sure a workforce acts responsibly, to protect themselves and others, is to make certain your employees are properly trained in health and safety. The law requires "adequate" health and safety training:

• when an employee first starts work
• when an employee is exposed to new or increased risks - when moving locations, dealing with new or different equipment, for example.

Training has to be repeated periodically but how often and to what degree is not stated in the legislation. In addition to training, employers also have to provide employees with "comprehensible and relevant" information on:

• risks to their health and safety
• measures put in place to protect them
• fire and other emergency precautions
• risk from other employers who share the same premises.

Employers have to consider a person's health and safety capabilities before giving them tasks that may give rise to risk and cause harm. Further, there are special requirements in relation to staff who are under 18.

The problem employers face is not just in providing health and safety information and training but in being able to demonstrate it has been provided and assessed to ensure it is effective. Seasonal and part-time workers and a general high turnover of staff make this more difficult.

It is the practical steps that will keep you within the law. When a new employee starts, check what health and safety training they have already received. Regardless of this, however, some immediate information and training is required, covering:

• emergency arrangements - fire, accidents and first aid
• significant risks to them identified in risk assessment - slips, trips and falls, manual handling, using machinery, etc.
• control measures for the above including the safe and healthy way to do their work and arrangements for supervision
• activities they are prohibited from doing
• protective equipment and clothing they need to wear
• arrangements for their welfare - drinking, eating, toilets, washing and hours of work
• safety policy and the specific sections that affect them.

It is best to provide some written health and safety information but you need to ensure employees can read and it is written in a language they understand. It helps to put some rules up around the workplace to remind employees and which are visible to inspectors and others.

When there is a serious accident or a fatality, training records will be requested. In a recent case, the defence was that health and safety training was not provided as it was common sense and employees were expected to learn by experience. There were no formal health and safety systems. The manager was found guilty of manslaughter and can expect a prison sentence.

• David Bryant works for the Chadwick House Group, the trading subsidiary of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health.

Safety checklist​

• Conduct a risk assessment to identify health and safety precautions
• Provide a health and safety induction for all new employees
• Check through supervision that employees are taking all the necessary precautions
• Consider providing a basic health and safety course
• Periodically remind employees of health and safety precautions
• Record each employee's induction, training, courses attended, certificates and assessments of their understanding

• For local health and safety training courses visit www.CIEH-Coursefinder.com
• HSE's leaflet Health and Safety Training: What You Need to Know is available at www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/indg345.pdf.