How often should Health & Safety training be refreshed?

Unfortunately, this isn’t a simple, set term answer. The frequency training needs to be refreshed will depend on a number of factors – like the type of training.

However, as a general rule, training should be re-visited on an annual basis.

Exclusions to the annual rule include:

Internal incidents – if there’s been an incident within your business that results in an employee, customer or client being injured, or if there’s been a near miss, you should refresh employees with the relevant training to minimise the risk of something similar happening again.

External incidents – if there’s been an incident in your industry that could apply to your business, it might be worth refreshing employees on relevant training.

This isn’t to say you need to refresh employees’ Health & Safety training for every external incident but, at the very least, we’d recommend you consider doing so for external incidents that result in a fatality.

When a process changes – if an internal process changes, or there’s a legislation change that requires you to change how you do something, inform all relevant employees of how the change might impact what they’ve learnt in training.

New equipment – if employees have been trained on how to use a piece of equipment and it changes a few months after their training, you must re-train them on how to use the new piece of equipment – regardless of how different it is. Prevention is better than cure.

Change in environment – using Control of Substances Hazardous to Health (COSHH) as an example, if you move premises, you’ll need re-visit certain aspects of employees’ COSHH training – like how and where to store hazardous substances.

Training got you in a tizzy?

Keeping on top of training can be tricky – we get that. But don’t let it get you in a tizzy. Our industry leading Health & Safety experts are here to help on 0345 844 1111.

Better yet, our online management platform – Atlas – is full of Health & Safety training courses, and automatically reminds you when training’s due to expire!