Do employers need to teach staff about health and safety?

The Health and Safety Executive in the United Kingdom recently recorded over 200 people every year are killed whilst executing their working duties. More than 2 million suffer illness, injury or disease which is a cause or aggravated by their working conditions. Preventing accidents and ill health at work is therefore a huge priority for both employers and employees.

It is crucial that employers consider health and safety training for all staff no matter what the particular working environment. It will make no difference whether you working on a building site or in an office, there can be hazards in just about every environment so we must recognise this.

Employers can protect themselves from prosecution and from civil compensation claims by adopting an intelligent safety regime. Training is a large element of this kind of regime.

By offering the necessary training to employees, employers can ensure that their staff will not be confronted with injury or illness. You can produce a positive health and safety culture where the entire workplace is mindful of any risks associated with their job. Training will contribute towards making the employees more informed and more mindful of their surroundings.

It could be that the employer is not aware of the extent to which staff are confronted with dangers in the workplace. Equally, an employer may well not fully understand how to best go about training their employees. It is strongly advised that companies consult with either the Health and Safety Executive or private consultants who can advise them more fully about what they could do to comply with basic health and safety legislation.

Once you have identified what training your organisation needs, you need to then settle on the training priorities. Top priorities would include those areas of risk in which a lack of knowledge or deficiency of training might cause injury or harm being suffered by staff. If uncertain, consult employees or their representatives to take a take on exactly where the danger areas lie within the working environment. Once you've made a choice, select the best training technique to get your message across to the team. This may involve one-to-one sessions or group sessions, which can be delivered either by knowledgeable members of staff or independent consultants. The biggest thing would be to ensure that any trainer is sufficiently qualified to carry out the job.

Once training is delivered, it is important to record this and also to then prepare for a refresher or update course following a certain time frame.

If you are self-employed but work with a team of people regularly who are under your instruction and control, then you should look into your responsibilities in a similar manner that any employer would do. If there are any employers who also deal with self-employed subcontractors, they ought to consider treating the individual as an employee when it comes to any health and safety training.