subject: How To Plan An Effective Health And Safety Training Meeting [print this page] Performing any form of presentation can be an extremely stressful business; if you haven't been able to plan effectively for every eventuality then the smallest of mistakes can throw you off balance and deflect from the impact of your presentation.
When performing health and safety training, it is essential that you have a series of items available for demonstrations, these can include empty cardboard boxes, potentially sharp objects and trolleys. This makes it much easier when performing the presentation as you can allow yourself time to think by performing a demonstration or by getting a member of the audience to perform a demonstration.
The main subjects to be covered when performing health and safety training are lifting, moving and stacking. Obviously one essential part of the training will involve picking up an object from the floor. For this exercise it is best to use an empty cardboard box, because it is large enough to make it awkward for the used to pick it up but not heavy enough to cause injury.
When ready ask the person to lift the box up. Obviously it is essential that the user keeps their back straight and bends their knees to lower themselves down to the box, when lifting the box it is important that the main effort used is from the legs again. A lot of users will find this exercise trivial but it is important to remember that there are a number of individuals currently seeking medical assistance for back pain, many from lifting boxes incorrectly.
When you are satisfied that your group has completed this task, move on to the next section of your health and safety training plan which will include stacking items. For this exercise you can show a series of slide showing correct and incorrectly stacked items and ask the users to vote on which is safe and which is unsafe. Throw in a couple of trick examples in order to catch out your students this way they are more likely to sit up and take notice.
For the final part of your health and safety training, place a pair of scissors on the desk of the students and ask them to pass the scissors to their neighbour. Obviously they should pick up the scissors and place the blade in their palm while offering the handle to their neighbour.
Keeping your health and safety training interactive like described above will help to keep people interested and help demonstrate competence. I usually find that a good way to finish off training is will a quick questionnaire to ensure that the points that you have made in the training session have been absorbed.
