What approach does your business take to training?  Is it all about budgets or have you looked to get workers trained on something that’s been highlighted in a risk assessment or maybe following an accident investigation.

Also do you know when you last arranged training for your workers and when would you plan to refresh that training?  These are important questions for any business because good quality health & safety training in our experience can have a massively positive effect on the way a business operates.

What we have also seen with the businesses we work with is that it’s really important to keep reminding workers about health & safety through drip feeding of training.  The use of regular updates through the likes of tool box talks or refresher updates helps to keep the importance of health & safety to the business in their mind.

Keeping training updated is also really important for any business that has to provide evidence of training to the many contractor pre-qualification schemes.  It’s no use expecting that a manual handling training certificate provided more than 3 years ago is likely to be accepted by many of the schemes.

For some areas of training, businesses are reminded about the need to update – for example, First Aid – but for most health & safety training that is not the case.  It’s important that your business has a plan to keep training refreshed and we believe that the drip feed approach works so well.