First published on Tuesday, January 7, 2025
Last updated on Tuesday, January 7, 2025
By ensuring that the relevant health & safety training is completed by all members of staff, senior managers and other business stakeholders, you can mitigate and reduce the number of workplace accidents. Plus, reduce any other damages or safety breaches that may occur because of a workplace hazard.
The importance of health & safety training in the workplace cannot be overstated and as an employer it’s your legal duty to identify safety hazards at work and manage these correctly. Let’s cover how you can manage workplace hazards with health and safety training.
Types of workplace safety hazards
Hazards in the workplace are categorised into separate groups. These being:
Physical
Chemical
Biological
Psychological
Each of which pose a different level of risk to your workplace and your staff. To understand the different types of workplace hazards and what these are, read our guide on ‘Hazards in the workplace’ for more information.
Health & safety training across the different types of workplace hazards is available for a wide range of businesses and industries. For example, COSHH training for employees who handle hazardous substances or lifting operations & lifting equipment awareness training for those using lifting equipment within their role.
Across different industries and roles some employees will be more likely to face hazards than others.
With such a wide range of health & safety training courses available to businesses and employees, you will find that certain courses are more relevant than others. Finding those which are applicable to your team and your workplace, will provide you with the most important information regarding health & safety for your business.
With our health & safety learning management system we offer a variety of health & safety e-learning courses for a range of industries, including:
Construction
Education
Care
Hospitality
Manufacturing
Office
Retail
Not only will these training courses inform you of how to prevent accidents and injuries in the workplace, but they will also ensure your employees are aware of relevant hazards and provide the guidance needed for them to address these correctly.
The importance of risk assessments
As well as providing the right training for your staff, completing thorough risk assessments is essential in identifying and managing hazards in the workplace.
A risk assessment is a review of your current workplace, which can be carried out either by an internal team or external assessor. It will identify hazards in your current workplace, the risks associated with these hazards, determine the best precautions to put in place to avoid these risks, and provide detailed findings which can be used to improve the health & safety of a workplace.
Our “Five steps to a risk assessment” article gives you all the information you need to conduct a risk assessment of your own.
Training your managers to conduct health & safety risk assessments
According to the HSE it is the legal responsibility of the employer to conduct risk assessments or to assign this role to a competent individual.
As a small business owner or a manager of a small team, you may not have done this before. Which is why risk assessment training can be a useful tool to ensure that your risk assessments are conducted correctly, thoroughly and tick the boxes required by UK legislation.
Risk assessment training doesn’t have to be complicated, with a simple e-learning course such as our Risk Assessment online training course you can quickly learn skills needed to identify hazards and risks in your workplace. If you want to ensure that all managers in your business can complete a risk assessment, with BrightSafe you can assign e-learning courses to specific employees as and when required.
Manage health & safety training with a learning management system
Free online health & safety training courses are available with the use of BrightSafe. Our innovative health & safety software that supports you by ensuring the protection and safeguarding of your staff and workplace.
BrightHR’s online learning management system provides access to a wide range of e-learning courses for health & safety. Covering a range of topic areas for a variety of industries. With courses on workplace hazards, you can guarantee your employees are up to date with the latest legislation and are aware of what to do when a hazard poses a risk to their wellbeing at work.
Access your FREE course today to discover your health & safety responsibilities and to understand how our learning management system works. Book a free demo to discover BrightSafe health & safety software to ensure a safer workplace for all.
