Lennie Hancock

Slips, trips and falls are the most common cause of workplace injuries, costing the UK £800million las 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 a mere inconvenience, but a real danger in the workplace, and should be treated as such.

The easiest way to prevent slips, trips and falls is to give staff safety training. Knowledge is the key to falls prevention, and there are training courses on the market which are going to prevent accidents, injuries and sick days effectively. But accident prevention training is often considered expensive and ineffective. There are, in fact, many interesting safety training courses available, which cut the odds of accidents in the workplace while being cost and time effective.

Once you see the benefit of training staff in a falls prevention course it helps to understand what to look for. For example, the length of a course is important. 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 perfect length for a falls prevention course is around 20minutes, but an ideal course will let staff learn through an interactive CD-ROM or online course in their own time, because everybody reads and absorbs information 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. Online courses and CD-ROMs can be used indefinitely 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. Choosing a falls prevention programme with a test at the end gives employers proof of what staff have learnt.

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.