Health & Safety – part one – The Importance of Education & Training
We took an opportunity to catch up with Martin Hembling, our Commercial Director, in the first of our new mini-series of health and safety blogs, to discuss the importance of education and training when it comes to health and safety.
Our ISO accreditations and our Swiftclean Training Academy supplement our Health and Safety standards at Swiftclean. We regularly carry out toolbox talks with various teams throughout the business and have a biweekly item on our management meeting agenda of health and safety where we review any accidents – and talk about solutions to any issues that may have arisen.
Within the Swiftclean Academy, our BESA instructors, Abbey and Richard, host the BESA Grease Hygiene courses (also soon to include Air Hygiene courses), which involve not only training our own staff but others in the industry, upskilling the industry as a whole to make processes more effective and safer.
The effort and forethought that we put into our Health and Safety processes is reflected in our excellent accident stats (which are below industry levels); the goal is to reach zero accidents and near misses, but this is neither realistic nor achievable in our industry, no matter the process in place. We are proud that the quality of our health and safety reporting is always acknowledged in tender returns.
It’s imperative for us to get to the root cause of any accident – to ensure we can address and rectify our processes, and this is as important as Martin’s tips below:
My top three tips:
- I cannot state the importance enough, of revisiting risk assessments and method statements regularly or after an event (such as an accident or near miss) has occurred, treat them as LIVING DOCUMENTS, they should be regularly updated and edited according to events, legislation updates, etc.
- The second thing I have learned in this role is to use the trained experts in my team. I regularly consult with my field staff to ensure the processes we put into place in risk assessments and method statements are practicable in real-life working practice; for example I recently spoke with Richie, my National Compliance Manager to discuss our confined space method statement and adjusted it according to advice from our rescue plan.
- Training staff to mitigate risks: Thirdly we are lucky enough to have a BESA-approved training centre on-site here at Swiftclean HQ – The Swiftclean Academy – with a mock kitchen extract system and ducting with examples of hazards that you could find in a real-life scenario, which we use to train our staff to mitigate the risks in their cleaning process.
By educating our employees to make sure they are properly trained in all aspects of health and safety relating to their specific roles, we keep them safe, reduce absences, and ensure that our workplace is more efficient and productive.
Keep an eye out for further health & safety blogs coming soon.
