What Are My Legal Obligations When it Comes to Health & Safety?
Health and safety should be a part of your business just as your sales and marketing, finance and administration departments. Your business can not function correctly without planning and implementing suitable health and safety measures. If your company is not up to date with current legislation it is only a matter of time until it catches up with you or worse an accident happens which could have been avoided. Unfortunately there are still many organisations in the United Kingdom which do not pay enough attention to workplace health, safety and training. As a business owner and employer you are legally bound and obligated as far as reasonably practicable to provide suitable and adequate health and safety training to keep employees safe
Benefits of Training Employees
Providing the right health and safety training for your employees promotes the following:- A positive health and safety culture
- Instills confidence in your workforce
- Improves employee perception of your organisation
- Increased profitability
- Reduces employee absence from work due to avoided accidents
Which Course Should I Book?
There is no quick answer to which health and safety course you should book. This really depends on the type of organisation you run and the number of employees.
Working Safely
If you are looking for a basic one day course to introduce your employee(s) to the most common hazards and health and safety issues in the workplace we would recommend the Working Safely course. The Working Safely course is suitable for all employees. It will provide an attendee with a basic understanding of issues we all face on a day to day basis, think of it as an awareness course.
Managing Safely
If you would like to send a supervisor or a manager on a course with a requirement for understanding risk assessments and how to conduct one we would recommend the IOSH Managing Safely course which is four days in duration.
For those who are going a step further and taking on responsibility for health and safety in the workplace the NEBOSH General Certificate may be of interest to you. If you run a construction company there are courses which are designed specifically for the industry including the NEBOSH Construction Certificate.