Developing health and safety training across Aberdeenshire

The provision of health and safety training plays a key role in the safe delivery of services and the wellbeing of employees. To ensure employees across Aberdeenshire receive the best possible training to meet the needs of their role, a project to analyse existing provision and what’s needed in the future is now underway across the organisation.
The council’s Health, Safety and Wellbeing Team is working alongside members of an Occupational Health and Safety Sub Group made up of colleagues from across services, with intention of achieving the following aims:

• To identify the health and safety training needs of individual posts throughout the organisation.

Do develop a training matrix for each post throughout the organisation.

To identify gaps in training and develop or outsource training to fill those gaps.

• To identify where refresher training is required and make recommendations on timescales
• To support services to develop new training via ALDO, webinars, toolbox talks, training DVDs and external training where appropriate.
• To assess the provision of training both by the council and by external providers to identify areas of duplication.

Health and Safety Advisor Graeme Stephen who is playing a lead role in the project explains: “This will help to ensure we’re identifying and sourcing health and safety training in the most efficient way possible. In time, every post will have a training matrix which identifies minimum training requirements and this will be reviewed on an ongoing basis by employees and their line managers.

“In order for us to achieve our goals it is important we get information from services to ensure that we can provide quality training that meets the organisation’s needs. We will be continuing to make contact with services to start of the information gathering process.”

For more information please contact Graeme Stephen on 01224 664879.

Example training matrix: