I received a “Dear John” e mail this morning from a company who had enquired about the Sapira 2SK Spill Kit Training Course. The e mail explained “that they had decided to go for the cheaper option, a Spill Training DVD”. My stomach turned over to be honest, not at losing the business but for the poor Health and Safety Officer who had sent the e mail. Clearly he had been out voted by the accountants on running a course involving practical elements in favour of a tick box approach using the DVD.
Far too often we are asked to run our spill training courses for organisations who have followed this route only to have an incident and to find, far too late, that this method of training just doesn’t work on its own. I always use the analogy when running a course that if a fireman jumped out of his truck carrying “Fire Fighting for Dummies” we would be a little concerned.
Spill Response Training has to be practical and memorable. That means it has to include all of the elements of Incident Management, Scene Management, Command & Control, Dynamic Risk Assessment etc, that a DVD just can’t do.
Out of interest I visited Mr Google to see what’s out there for the cash strapped buyer of spill training and found two examples of the problem on page one.
Marcom’s Dealing with Hazardous Spills is just one example.It boasts :
A Safety Training Program, Dealing with Hazardous Spills, Time 23 Min, Language English, Includes DVD, Leader’s Guide, Employee Quiz, Training Certificate, Scheduling Forms, Topics Covered Include Personal Protective Equipment, Initial Spill Response, Clean Up
Running Time – 23 mins !!
Oh well that should really get the spill responders well trained and ready for action then !!
Oh well that should really get the spill responders well trained and ready for action then !!
Safety Media’s product is even less inspiring.
The DVD is extremely useful to inform on the legislations and what they cover as well as providing information on chemical spills and how easily they can get into the water supplies.The DVD covers:
- The risk of spills to the employer and employee
- Information on risks associated with non-compliant and poorly practised spill control
- Clearly identifies stratagies and procedures to prevent unecessary spills
- What to do if a spill occurs
The DVD supports roles of the First Responder, Supervisor, Engineer and Health and Safety Manager who have a responsibility for safe working procedures and emergency response strategies. Containing a wealth of information on the risk associated with non-compliant and poorly practiced spill control and clearly identifies strategies and procedures to prevent unnecessary spills and what to do if it occurs. The pack comes complete with 50 COSHH Assessment forms and 10 COSHH Training booklets.
Oh well I feel so much more confident now then. Shame about the poor guy in the boiler suit. He has clearly watched the video and knows exactly what to do. Handling the incident on his own, having paddled through the spill to get to his spill kit and using socks on block paving, which incidentally isn’t working, but atleast it looks good in the picture. I presume it’s there to show you how not to do it !!
I’ve blogged about this before. There is no free lunch if you are going to address unplanned incidents which have the potential to cause harm.
So here is a challenge to all those free lunchers. Let us come and run an unplanned incident for you to test how good your training has been and assess your current incident management status. What have you got to lose? If you have ISO 14001 its a great way of demonstrating constant improvement and compliance with Section 4.4.7. If you are concerned about being able to demonstrate due diligence and compliance with your duty of care to both the environment and your employees then once again this would be a sensible step.
Finally though, if you really do care about doing the job properly and not just ticking the box, and your COSHH register includes chemicals requiring PPE and RPE then please consider running some training which reflects the likely hazards that you are expecting your spill response team to handle.
Far too many organisations fall into the trap of having bought a spill kit, usually to comply with an impending audit, not providing adequate training, not agreeing the scope of response and worse still never allowing the time or budget to run an exercise to test the theory.
Its’ knowing what to do in the first 10 minutes of an incident that prevents things going drastically wrong and there is only one way to test that and it’s not buy watching a DVD..