Training should be part of an overall risk management programme

Should follow on after consideration of:

 task

 load

 working environment

 individual capability

 work organisation

The panel strongly agreed that training should be part of an on-going process and seen as an important component of managing risk in the workplace as opposed to conducting one-off training as part of regulatory compliance.

One panel member suggested that two further items should be added to the list of factors to consider: audit and review (covered in a later guideline).

2. Before even thinking about training

 conduct MH risk assessment

 adopt a participatory ergonomics approach

 build management support

Members of the panel commented:

‘I think you’ve got that slightly the wrong way round. I think you want to start with build management support.’

‘If you start from good management support and work downwards, then maybe if that’s mandatory for the management; if they know that the penalties are going to be against management, then maybe that’s where you can start.’

‘I think we can turn the tide away from trying to escape negative consequences towards particularly for management, building in the idea of the positive business case benefits.’

‘Actually it’s about internal communications within an organisation. Because often we find that we’re dealing with the health and safety manager or the health and safety director of an organisation who’s trying to put a justification together for the costs of the programme. But actually if you then went to the insurance department and actually looked at how much they were paying out at the back end, then nine times out of ten the cost is justification itself. Because the training inevitably pays for itself, but they struggle to get that money up front.’

3. Management support is crucial to success

 needs visible commitment

 managers need to be familiar with course content

 suggest including managers in training session

The panel members agreed that involving managers can be helpful but some cautioned: ‘There’s a danger with including managers as you can lose control of the session’ and that ‘It becomes a worker and manager session instead of a training session.’ It was generally acknowledged that such sessions need careful handling. Even where managers are not present it was felt important to allow training participants the opportunity to give open feedback:

‘We usually allow a bit of time in our courses for what we call blood letting where they get to gripe about whatever it is they want, because it’s overcoming that resistance and also you can feed that back to managers and occasionally there’ll be people, because we’re looking across the business, that can answer questions that people have.’

4. Training should be viewed as an on-going process

 Training is not a ‘one-off’

 Needs to build and maintain knowledge and skills (refresher courses)

 Need to discourage ‘tick box’ mentality, focusing on legal compliance

 Consider ‘cascade’ training

It was considered that cascade training was a valuable method for improving working practices, however one panel member discussing training in the health service noted:

‘It’s about having time to implement that, to give them the training and the support and then building blocks to support them as they go through. Within the PCTs and things like that people leave and move. Then you’ve lost that fantastic, enthusiastic, motivated person because they’ve been seen as fantastic, enthusiastic, motivated and then you have to start again.’

‘It’s also about making the population want to be responsible for their own health and safety as well. It isn’t just a management kind of responsibility is it? And if you want to live a long and happy life and be fit and well, by applying these principles at home and in the work place, that’s what’s going to actually help.’

‘Comet did a very good exercise a couple of years ago with the better backs thinking the HSE where - people actually delivered their goods, their white goods, to people’s homes - they went and watched how they do it. And it turns out that over the years people who had been doing that for some time had built up tremendous techniques and skills for getting washing machines and driers and things like that across people’s wooden floors without damaging the floors, without damaging their backs.’

The panel discussed the fact that manual handling training is a skill for life and not simply confined to workplace activities:

‘…. manual handling, it seems this evil thing that we have to do. And what we should all do in order to be able to do it is go and do some physical exercise and get fit …. this can be your physical fitness.’

‘I think we need to get rid of the term manual handling because everybody goes – uumm - I think we’ve got to change it and we’ve got to relate it back to people.’

‘The employer is doing it because he’s got to or because he wants to, it’s one or the other. But deep down the real beneficiary in this will be you the individual …. simple things like not being able to pick up your son or daughter because your back won’t let you. These are the things that I think people need to consider.’

One panel member described an approach she observed in manual handling training in the utility industry:

‘He did a presentation describing a chap who’d fallen down a slope and he’d broken something …. an arm or something …. and he couldn’t lift up his brand new twins ….

that was devastating for this chap and I think for three months he couldn’t actually hold his babies. And the power of that to this audience was absolutely extraordinary.’

5. How often should MH training be conducted?

 evidence from literature weak

 MH training should be a planned on-going programme – no end point

Some commented that training during induction followed by annual training seemed appropriate but also agreed that frequency should be determined by need: ‘If you’re monitoring behaviour, as soon as behaviour starts to decay …. If you’re monitoring accidents, as soon as your accidents start to go up.’

‘But we are assuming that manual handling training will fail or it will wear off …. the natural position is to do it badly and we’re trying to drag people away from it. If five years down the line you’re still doing fantastic, self-monitoring and improved practice, then do you need it again?’

‘if somebody has an accident, then they have to go for training again, they develop a chronic ill health situation where their life style has to change; then they go through the training again. And that way you pick up as somebody said all the individual differences, because ideally it should be second nature.’

6. The trainer should have:

 charisma

 credibility

 experience

 breadth of knowledge

 ability to engage and communicate

The panel agreed with the suggested characteristics and noted that these vary depending on the form of training. With regard to people selected for cascade training, one panel member commented: ‘there is a kind of a trade off there because what they may lose in charisma ….

they’re gaining credibility.’

The panel commented on the lack of standardisation and regulation, as one panel member put it:

‘Maybe what we should be looking at is a credible professional trainer’s course before you actually become a trainer. I’m talking about professional trainers because we are not teachers, we’re trainers. It’s a different thing altogether. I was at a first aid conference a couple of weeks ago where there was an Australian trainer there. And he said that all the trainers who train first aid in Australia must have this minimum trainer’s trainer qualification before they’re allowed to do any training. And it’s interesting we have got nothing that regulates us, especially within manual handling.

Anybody off the street can go and teach a manual handling course. So there’s no regulation on it at all.’

‘What you train today is probably different to what was trained ten years ago. I think it’s an evolving body of knowledge and techniques that are used and always put across as changed and will continue to change. And remember that there’s some research a few years ago and it found that the trainers, the videos – not only training different things, some of them were absolutely contradictory in what they say.’

‘But if the trainer is an accredited trainer whose competency level is such that they could train manual handling one day and they could do something else the next and something else the day after, it doesn’t matter what they train because they know when they’re training they have to know their subject, know the legislation outside, know the work place they’re going into.’

‘I’m not actually convinced because some of the people that have been most effective that I’ve seen on lifting and handling training are not formal trainers, but they’re extremely good at engaging and communicating and are very charismatic. And they just sweep people along with them.’