As an employer, your workplace environment is regulated by specific requirements that you have to meet to ensure that workers perform duties in the safest conditions possible. These requirements include providing adequate safety draining, access to safety equipment and procedures, and access to first aid equipment and training. As an employer, you have a duty of care, and you want to ensure that your employees are well trained and well equipped to maintain safe working conditions.
First Aid Training
The first aid skills that your employees have are best maintained and updated each year as new techniques and technologies such as AED (Automated External Defibrillator) are developed and implemented. By keeping your employees’ first aid qualifications up to date, you are giving them the skills to adequately assess and manage a medical emergency with confidence, as well as the ability to calmly provide first aid when faced with a medical emergency. First aid training for the workplace includes providing basic emergency life support, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, defibrillation with an AED, treating severe, life threatening allergic reactions with the EpiPen device, and more. The better trained your employees are, the less risk you have as an employer.
Workplace Hazards
Common workplace hazards are often caused by a lack of workplace maintenance or a lack of proper training in the safe operation of equipment. Electrical equipment poses the hazard of injury by electric shock, and employees need to know how to safely respond to an emergency by applying first aid in the vicinity of live electrical panels and equipment. Hazardous materials are often mishandled or stored in an unsafe manner, and a lack of training for employees that handle hazardous materials compounds the hazards. Slips and falls due to improperly marked trip or safety hazards can cause head, spine, and neck injuries.
Fire Safety Training
Workplace fires are another common hazard that calls for specialised training and procedures. Training includes prevention of workplace fires and the appropriate response to safely contain and put out a fire. First aid and fire safety training courses from Safe Response are an effective preventative measure that gives your employees the knowledge, skills, and confidence to assess fire hazards and safely respond to them, while managing first aid responses to injuries. Fire safety training is a requirement for many employers and is valuable in preventing serious damage, injury, or loss of life in case of a fire.
Continuous Practice
First aid, workplace safety, and fire safety are important practices that must be continuously updated and applied in a training environment to ensure that employees are well prepared to respond to real hazards in the workplace. An employee will start to lose skills within days of learning them if those skills are not put into practical use on a regular basis. It is beneficial to implement monthly training and practice sessions with your employees to ensure that they retain the skills that you count on them to have. Employees should undergo formal training and recertification yearly to ensure that knowledge and skills are updated and aligned with modern practices, technologies, and techniques.