Whilst working as the health and safety manager at Scotland’s number one ready meals company, Kenneth took on the responsibility to look at the companies training system. The objective was to reduce the myriad of training needed by each staff member in order to comply with food safety, and health and safety standards.
Training would run in line with financial year. Incorporating 6 training levels; focusing on employees’ positions and roles. The training levels are mentioned below. All staff would need to attend work procedure training from manual handling, COSHH, PPE, to pest control.
½ Day
WP Specific
½ Day
1 Day
3 Day
Course specific
To start with a Gap Analysis was done which uncovered the need for staff to perform over 200 training objectives on an annual basis. Clearly this was not practicable or cost, time effective.
Then began the painful task of sifting through all the subjects and combining these into tasks e.g COSHH looked at cleaning, hygiene standards, using chemicals, procedures, chemical instruction cards.Enabling many subjects to be consolidated into one or several training regimes.
The outcome took 1 ½ years to develop, write and deliver to a staff,and has proved through big food audits (BRC) that it continually gets mentioned as excellent.
System could be tailored to each employee.
This focused on what the employee needed rather than just attend training sessions for the sake of it.
Budgets and forecasts were much easier to forecast.This made the finance department really happy.
Streamlining of training saved money, was focused and added great value to the company.
Driscoll Safety draws on the skills gained through a lifetime of learning and delivering training.
One of the most important aspects was a document called the task skills analysis form, which served as a lesson plan, covering Employment Objectives, Training Objectives and Skills level to be achieved by each employee. This document also served as the employee training record. If an employee only needed certain aspects of the training due to their position and job role then that’s all they were trained in.
Connor’s company pHX Water is a trusted provider of legionella risk assessments, tank cleaning & disinfection services and private water supply installations across Scotland.His main aim as a company was to achieve the accolade of safe contractor, but initially wanted to develop a robust Health and Safety Management System. So as his company grew in size the Health and Safety element would already be well established.
I had worked with Connor before in the food industry and had a good understanding of his business needs and together we came up with a plan.One of the main focuses was to ensure that any paperwork was kept to a minimum for his guys to use whilst on the job.
Over a period of a few months,Driscoll Safety wrote policies, procedures e.g COVID,H&S policy, with the assistance of Connor and his staff. We further developed risk assessments and introduced robust safe systems of work.Once this was achieved all the information, policies,procedures was discussed and implemented with Connor’s team.
This was then followed up by taking a good look at all training and certification of the guys.Driscoll Safety assisted in developing a training matrix,and carried out various aspects of the training which included first aid .So now all of pHX Water are first aid qualified.
In June 2021 Connor and pHX Water were successful in obtaining accreditation to Alcumus Safe Contractor Scheme.So now any prospective customer can be confident they are employing a safe competent business.
