Choosing effective slips, trips and falls training
Slips, trips and falls are the most common cause of accidents in the workplace, and cost the UK £800 million last year. Over 15,000 workers suffered major injuries from slipping or tripping at work, and 40 workers lost their lives last year as a result. Slips, trips and falls are therefore not an inconvenience or embarrassment, but a real danger in the workplace, and should be treated this way.
The easiest way to prevent slips, trips and falls is to give staff safety training. Knowledge is definitely the key to falls prevention, and the easiest way to give staff a safety training course. But accident prevention training is often considered expensive and ineffective. This is why it comes as a surprise to many that there are interesting slips, trips and falls awareness courses available which are cost-effective, time-effective and prevent accidents in the workplace.
Once you see the benefit of training staff in a falls prevention course it helps to understand what to look for. For example, consider the length of the course. You won’t want a slips, trips and falls course to be too long in that you lose too much staff time or wages, but you want it to be long enough to get the message across. The ideal length for a falls prevention course is 20minutes, but this should allow staff to learn in their own time. CD-ROMs and online courses are created with the understanding that everybody learns and reads at a different speed.
There are many advantages of choosing CD-ROM or online courses to traditional teaching or presentation methods. They can be paused and finished at another time, and the progress of different users can be tracked simultaneously. They also tend to be cheaper than hiring the services of a health and safety teacher, and staff can work at their desk or elsewhere in the workplace, or even at home, and you do not need all employees to carry out the falls training at the same time, improving efficiency in the workplace. CD-ROMs and online courses also boast unlimited use and can therefore be used to train other staff in the future.
Ensure that your accident prevention training comes with technical support if you are choosing a CD-ROM or online-based learning programme. For effective prevention of accidents in the workplace consider the course’s content too. Choose a training course with high quality content, a mix of media such as videos, pictures and text, and interactivity to make the information more memorable. A falls prevention programme with a test at the end will give you proof that staff have undergone training.
Following all of these tips and choosing an effective falls prevention course will reduce the chances of slips, trips and falls, and lead to a safer workplace.
IHASCO provide the highest quality of safety training courses on the market. Their CD-ROMs and online courses cover a comprehensive range of accident prevention training with interactive software featuring videos, graphics, images and tests.
Slips, trips and falls