Significant changes have been made to the First aid at Work Regulation with effect from the 1st of October 2009.

Businesses needs to familiarise themselves with these changes to avoid falling foul of the new regulations.

Although safety records in offices  have improved significantly over the last 10 years there is still much to do.  Many businesses comply in spirit only to the current regulations, not realising that there is a current legal requirement for first aid training, risk assessment  and to appoint qualified personal within their offices.

Full details of the changes to be implemented can be found on the St Johns Ambulance site ( where there is also a very useful online questionnaire to help you find out if you are meeting your responsibilities).

The main changes to the regulations are that the current 4 day training course will be reduced to a 3 day course and aimed more specifically and higher risk businesses and industries.
A new one day “emergency first aid course” will be implemented and this will be aimed at business and industries where the risk is lower.

The concept of the changes is to generally reduce the amount of time that employees are away from work, and to make the training more specific to the level or risk in the relevant industry.

Any qualifications achieved on these courses will last for 2 years, by which time a 2 day “re-qualifier”  training course will be required,  and the first aider will be encouraged to return annually for a half day refresher course.

It is hoped that these measures will encourage employers to allow more staff to become qualified first aiders, with specific knowledge about their specific type of risks, and to allow these first aiders to attend frequent refresher courses.

Changes to the course content, together with simplification of many of the procedures, will mean that the course is as comprehensive as in the past, whilst taking 25% less time.
The HSE also intend to contact  businesses in order to make them more aware of what their legal obligations are, with respect to first aid regulations.
There are strict guidelines as to how many qualified first aiders you  require for your size of business, and this depends on number of locations, locality to medical services, type and risk of industry, plus many other factors, all of which will become apparent if you take a few minutes to go through the St Johns questionnaire.

However, the onus still remains with the business principals to evaluate and understand their own risk exposure , and to ensure that enough of their employees are fully qualified to offer comprehensive and competent care, should a situation arise.

Big steps have been made towards improving the health and safety at work record, with deaths at work falling by over 20% in the last year.

Much work has been done to educate and advise smaller and medium sized businesses about the importance of having enough qualified first aiders on hand to cope with the first few minutes of any emergencies or accidents at work.

These few minutes literally mean life or death to some employees, who have been looked after one of their trained colleagues, until the Emergency Services arrive.

If you require any information regarding health and safety at work, and advice as to how to assess and reduce your exposure to risk, the Health and Safety Executive is making over 250 priced publications available in PDF format from their Website.

The HSE’s 5 year strategy is to make this information easily available to all employees  to help them understand their legal duties and what actions they can take to minimise their risks to accidents and events and how to reduce the severity of these accidents and event should they happen.

For more information please go to www.hse.gov.uk