Hi All Just wanted to pick your brains. How do you practically go about providing training for staff on a specific patient hoist when you have thousands of continually changing staff and numerous different makes and models of hoist? We unfortunately have no control over what hoists patients have in their homes. We provide the staff but not the equipment. It isn't practical to provide each member of staff with training on each type of hoist available. Thanks in advance

I Agree. I am a patient handling instructor and we would only ever give instruction in one type of hoist. The basics of all hoists are pretty much the same so teach them the principles and provide instructional videos via youtube on your intranet for all types (or as many as you can). Its more inportant that the understand the movement, safe loading/use of sling and safe operating measures. The continually changing staff is a major issue but I know many organisations this side of the water hire care workers on a contract basis and they must have completed the certified training to be awarded the contract. Bring into mind the question of how do you prove they are competent?

Sorry I didn't answer the question in my last post - GB1977 here is what we do. All our staff get safer handling training, consisting of 1/2 days training with the usual manual handling stuff, including a practical exercise. During this training we explain the person centered approach, pushing and pulling a wheelchair, and a simple lateral maneuver. Where staff need trained on hoists, out trainers will attend the persons home and train the staff team in the safe use of the equipment, and sign them off as being competent - this can range between 1 and 3 hours dependant on the equipment and the type of maneuvers available. BTW we employ over 2500 staff so as you can imagine it can be difficult to get all the staff trained all of the time and there are times where staff may use a piece of equipment without the training.

Thanks for the responses so far. Some very interesting differences in opinion which give real food for thought. My own personal problem with this is that my safety head says that staff need training on the hoist they are using and that if we had an incident how could we defend our position if we said they had been trained on a different make or model and had never used that particular hoist until in the service users home? But how can I realistically improve the training/information given to workers when we have limited control over who is working where and for how long and no control over the equipment in a home. If we had a stable workforce it wouldn't be such an issue (although still a huge task!) but the nature of the business means that we continually have different workers every week and have over 30 types of hoist out there. Some workers stay a while some move on very quick. We have over 4000 on the books at any one time with about half being utilised each week. No easy answer me thinks!