Healthcare Workplace Occupational Health and Safety Training Course

Course overview

Healthcare organisations face occupational risks that change by shift, clinical area and patient population: needlestick injuries, manual handling strain, exposure to infectious diseases, hazardous medicines, violence, slips, fatigue and unsafe contractor activity. Staff may understand individual policies but struggle to turn them into reliable controls, incident investigations and audit evidence. This course equips participants to identify where care delivery creates risk and to apply proportionate controls without obstructing clinical workflows.

Participants learn to use a healthcare-specific risk assessment process, apply the hierarchy of controls, distinguish workplace incidents from occupational illness trends, and interpret key requirements in ISO 45001 and OSHA-aligned safety management practice. The programme addresses infection prevention interfaces, sharps safety, hazardous substances, patient handling, workplace violence, emergency preparedness and worker wellbeing. Participants also practise reporting, investigating and learning from events using causal analysis rather than assigning blame.

Delivery combines instructor-led teaching with hospital, clinic and laboratory scenarios. Teams assess a simulated ward, review incident records, complete a task-based risk assessment, build a control plan and conduct a structured incident investigation. Each participant leaves with a practical Healthcare Occupational Health and Safety Action Pack: a completed risk register, inspection checklist, investigation template, control-plan priorities and a 90-day implementation plan tailored to their own service or department.

The course suits operational, clinical-support and safety personnel who need a common method for managing workforce safety. It is particularly useful where managers are responsible for both staff wellbeing and safe continuity of patient care, or where an organisation needs stronger evidence that hazards are being identified, controlled, monitored and reviewed.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Conduct a task-based healthcare risk assessment using hazard, exposure, likelihood and consequence criteria
• Apply the hierarchy of controls to sharps, manual handling, infectious-disease and hazardous-substance risks
• Build a departmental risk register with control owners, review dates and residual-risk ratings
• Complete an OSHA 300/301-aligned incident record and distinguish recordable events from near misses
• Investigate a workplace incident using the five-whys method, causal factors and corrective-action tracking
• Design an inspection checklist for clinical areas, including equipment, emergency, housekeeping and PPE controls
• Analyse leading and lagging safety indicators to prioritise occupational health and safety interventions
• Produce a 90-day occupational health and safety improvement plan for a healthcare work area

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• Health and Safety Officers — who need a repeatable method for managing clinical workplace hazards
• Healthcare Operations Managers — who are accountable for safe staffing, facilities and day-to-day service delivery
• Nurse Unit Managers — who supervise frontline teams exposed to sharps, violence, infection and manual handling risks
• Facilities and Engineering Managers — who manage plant, contractors, maintenance permits and physical workplace controls
• Infection Prevention and Control Practitioners — who must connect exposure-control measures with wider worker safety systems
• HR and Occupational Health Professionals — who support injury reporting, return-to-work and workforce wellbeing decisions

Requirements and prerequisites

This is a foundation-to-intermediate course and does not require a formal health and safety qualification. Participants should be familiar with their own healthcare setting, such as a ward, clinic, laboratory, pharmacy, care facility or support service, and should be able to describe common work tasks and local incident-reporting arrangements. Basic awareness of PPE, infection prevention and organisational policies is helpful but not assumed. A complete beginner should expect guided explanations of risk assessment terminology, legal-duty concepts and incident investigation. No prior experience with ISO 45001, OSHA logs, specialist software or statistical analysis is required.

Training methodology

An experienced instructor leads short, focused sessions using healthcare scenarios from wards, outpatient services, laboratories, pharmacies and facilities operations. Participants work with risk matrices, sample incident reports, inspection records and exposure-control data rather than generic safety examples. Small groups assess a simulated clinical work area, identify control gaps and test investigation questions against a realistic event narrative. Facilitated peer review helps participants challenge weak controls and unclear actions. The final workshop converts course outputs into a prioritised 90-day plan for each participant’s workplace.

Course outline

Day 1: Healthcare occupational safety foundations

• Occupational health and safety duties in healthcare settings
• ISO 45001 safety management system principles
• Healthcare hazard categories and exposure pathways
• Worker safety and patient safety interfaces
• Hazard identification during routine and non-routine work
• Risk matrix design: likelihood, consequence and residual risk
• Hierarchy of controls for clinical environments

Workshop: Participants map hazards in a simulated outpatient clinic and produce an initial task-based hazard inventory.

Day 2: Controlling priority clinical hazards

• Sharps injury prevention and safer-device controls
• Bloodborne pathogen exposure response procedures
• Manual patient handling and ergonomic task analysis
• Hazardous drugs, chemicals and safety data sheets
• Respiratory protection and fit-testing programme essentials
• PPE selection, use limitations and disposal controls
• Workplace violence prevention and de-escalation controls

Workshop: Teams complete a control hierarchy review for a needlestick, patient-transfer or aggressive-behaviour scenario and produce a control plan.

Day 3: Risk assessment, inspections and monitoring

• Task-based risk assessment worksheet completion
• Departmental risk registers and escalation thresholds
• Clinical-area safety inspection checklist design
• Safety rounds and worker consultation techniques
• Contractor and visitor safety controls
• Emergency preparedness for spills, fires and exposure events
• Leading and lagging occupational safety indicators

Workshop: Participants conduct a desktop safety inspection of a ward layout and produce a scored inspection report with assigned actions.

Day 4: Incident reporting and learning

• Near-miss, injury, illness and exposure event classification
• OSHA 300 and 301 recordkeeping concepts
• Immediate response and evidence preservation
• Five-whys analysis and causal-factor mapping
• Interview planning for affected workers and witnesses
• Corrective actions versus superficial fixes
• Trend analysis from incident and absence data

Workshop: Participants investigate a simulated sharps-exposure incident and produce a causal analysis with corrective and preventive actions.

Day 5: Implementing a sustainable safety programme

• Safety roles, accountabilities and committee structures
• Worker consultation and just-culture reporting
• Training needs analysis and competency verification
• Auditing controls against ISO 45001 requirements
• Corrective-action registers and closure verification
• Occupational health surveillance and return-to-work interfaces
• Ninety-day improvement planning and management reporting

Workshop: Participants assemble their Healthcare Occupational Health and Safety Action Pack and present a prioritised 90-day implementation plan.

Tools & standards covered

ISO 45001:2018, OSHA 29 CFR 1910, OSHA 300 and 301 Recordkeeping Forms, NIOSH Revised Lifting Equation

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions