Health and safety training can benefit any organisation – no matter if they are a small nursing home serving a local community or a large multinational with clients on every continent. They help ensure their staff are secure and are able to cope with difficult, perhaps life threatening, situations and help protect the members of the public.

Asbestos, for instance, is an area which directly impacts people’s health. Both medical professionals and those who come into contact with it e.g. construction workers, need to receive proper training from an accredited training provider to understand the laws surrounding the material and how best to handle it.

A building firm from Barnet, London, MP Builders Ltd, was recently fined over £2,000 in addition to £4,500 in costs after failing to provide its workers with the correct training needed to handle asbestos. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) gave it ample time to provide training but it consistently failed to do so, potentially endangering members of the public in addition to its own employees.

Stephron Baker Holmes, from the HSE, said: “The improvement notice was straightforward. It was simple and inexpensive to comply with, by providing training to employees liable to be exposed to asbestos.[…] If the company had any doubts or questions, it had ample opportunity to ask them and I would have done all I could to help. Instead it apparently buried its head in the sand.”