If you provide health & safety training for your employees, do you consider when or how often should this training be updated?  It’s all too easy to become complacent and think that your employees have been trained in the past and therefore should know what they are doing.  But the question is, how do you test this?

Our experiences show us that it’s vitally important to remind employees on a regular basis otherwise they will either forget or choose to ignore what they have been taught.  If you are properly monitoring health & safety performance of your business then it will often become obvious when training needs to be updated.

We recently delivered a refresher session for a client where training had previously been provided two years before; but they had noticed a change in attitude towards health & safety.  What we found was that the employees had started to forget some of the importance of good health & safety practices and were prepared to take short cuts in order to get the job done. This wasn’t something the business wanted because it puts a lot of emphasis on health & safety, as does its main customers.

For some training, such as First Aid then refresher training, periods are clearly defined, but for other aspects such as health & safety awareness, manual handling, and fire training, this is open to interpretation.

However, for many businesses, the benefits of routinely updating training is clearly measurable in its health & safety performance and therefore the business should be able to set its own training calendar.  What might be worth considering is to ensure that training is updated at least every 2-3 years; this will not only remind employees but will also allow for new information to be delivered.

If you’re not sure or maybe you need bespoke or off the shelf health & safety training then please call us for free advice.