At First Aid Accident & Emergency, we spend a lot of time training staff in their own business environment. This is ideal as it allows the first aid and safety procedures, which are taught in our First Aid courses, to be tailored directly to their own surroundings.
While it is important to ensure your staff members are all knowledgeable in basic first aid, a lot of incidents can actually be prevented by making small (or sometimes big) changes to the actual layout of your workplace.
The team at FAAE have come across many situations with their offsite training where they have spotted dangerous safety hazards in a workplace environment, many of them occuring in corporate environments. A lot of these hazards are obvious to the outsider but when you and your staff are in the same workplace day-in and day-out it can be easy to become complacent and oblivious to potentially harmful situations.
Here’s some easy tips on how to keep your business safe:
- Ensure all staff are aware of the location of the First Aid kit and manual.
- Have staff complete an FAAE First Aid course.
- Ensure all staff members are aware of the location of the fire hydrant and
how to use it. - Have an allocated area that can be used to attend to any First Aid incidents. Ideally this will be away from other staff and customers with a chair they can sit in and/or some clear floor space if they need to lie down.
- Check that all electrical adapters and power boards are not being over-exerted
(which can cause over-heating). - Make sure electrical connections are not placed in areas where they can get wet
(e.g next to pot plants). - All staff should know how to get a copy of an incident report. These are important to complete at the time of the incident to ensure times and details of the incident are accurate, especially if there is a customer involved.
- If possible, always have an ice-pack in the freezer.
- Keep communication open with staff members of health conditions
(e.g asthma, allergies). - Move any tripping hazard. Is there a piece of carpet or cable that your staff keeps tripping over? Move it to prevent any serious incident.
- Never be afraid to call an ambulance. It is better to be safe than sorry.
