Health and Safety Training and Development

Earlier this year Aptus achieved RoSPA Gold for the fifth year running. Here, Delicia Maxwell, HSQE manager, discusses the company’s approach to health and safety training and development, and explains why the mental health of the team is as important as their physical health.

Health and safety culture

We’re proud to have recently received a gold medal at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents’ (RoSPA) Health and Safety Awards, which is testament to the hard work of the whole team. Rather than seeing training as a chore, we’ve worked hard to ensure training is people-led and the team are actively engaged in their individual development plans.

When it comes to the health and safety of people who spend much of their working day on a construction site, many people automatically think of physical wellbeing, for example the provision of PPE. In fact, looking after the mental health of our people is of equal priority and as such, we have launched many initiatives to support them. Mental health and safety are intrinsically linked – stressed employees are much more likely to make mistakes that could lead to accidents.

Mental health training

The construction industry has a poor record when it comes to mental health. With challenging deadlines – and frequent unplanned delays to schemes – the environment can be stressful, and therefore access to support and mental health first aid training has never been so important. We now have 35 trained mental health support volunteers across our sites. There has been a real shift in recent years with more site-based colleagues than ever before volunteering to become mental health ambassadors. Often, they have personal reasons for volunteering. It’s been pleasing to see that the number of people off work due to mental health sickness has decreased in line with the increase in mental health training.

The industry must comply with an ever-increasing number of regulations, standards and reporting measures aimed at reducing the number of health and safety incidents. Because of this, health and safety training and development is an ongoing process which must be regularly reviewed. Concurrently, mental health provision must also be regularly evaluated and updated in line with the needs of the team.

New learnings

Fostering a safety conscious workforce where individuals look out for their colleagues helps create an engaged team who work together to promote a positive health and safety culture. As well as being conscious of the physical health of people on site and potential factors that might impact this, the aim is for people to be equally aware of the wellbeing and mental health of team members and ensure that support is in place for those that require it.

Published on 31st July 2024