I go for yearly refresher training

Why? If staff do manual handling every day then they should be good at it, experts in fact especially if they are being properly supervised. On the other had doing a refresher every year for people who only do the occasional bit of manual handling eg office staff moving boxes of documents during an occasional room move would be overkill.

Sorry for the slow response. Have you heard of the conscious competency model? It is the four stages of training. You start at 1 and work through: 1. Unconsciously Incompetent: You don't know how to do something so cannot do it. We all start here prior to training or instruction. 2. Consciously Incompetent: You know what to do but don't put it into practice. This is where you have had training but are still putting it into practice. 3. Consciously Competent: You know what you are doing and how to do it and you can do it! This is the ideal place 4. Consciously Incompetent: You know what to do but you do not do it. This is where bad habits slip in. This will eventually turn into unconscious incompetence as you will stop thinking about the right way to do it and fall into habit. The theory behind this is that the more you do something the quicker you move through this model. Guys who do manual handling every day are likely to develop bad habits and thus move into number 4 quite quickly. If left unchecked, they can then fall abck to number 1. Annual refresher training combined with workplace inspections keep our workforce consciously competent and (touch wood) I can say we are yet to have a problem with Manual Handling in the business. I very rarely see anyone carrying out unsafe manual handling work. Sorry for the long post, but you did ask "why"!

Either or. Still gets the same results and leads back to 1 which is the important bit. I have seen Consciously Incompetent and unconsciously competent used.

Tends to take me 30-45 minutes with a group of around 10. This includes a knowledge check at the end too but the time of course depends on the needs of the group and questions (which are quite rare to be honest!).

I asked the why question because I sometimes get concerned that refresher training particularly manual handling training can become a tick box exercise. Telling people in a formal sense what they should be doing year in year out will look irrelevant. Post #5 and #6 seem to get it right. It’s not about doing regular reported training sessions it’s about mentoring and monitoring an in particular getting the line manager’s on side so that they understand what their staff are supposed to be doing and how they should be doing it.

I'd suggest the frequency depends on three principal things: What you teach them How well you teach them How well they use it We back this up with good supervision and don't do refreshers for MH. With the usual caveats of significant change, poor performance and return to work etc. I know it's not a perfect world, but setting your refresher for anything should be based on some sort of logic rather than a convenient calendar date. We get to drive cars from a fairly early age with no real refresher other than learning lessons every day we do it. OK so some never learn, hence having the Police to remind us what the rules are. So something that is frankly considerably less hazardous than driving doesn't need to be done annually in my view. Asking what frequency everyone else does it, presumes that we all train people in the same way and the same material. We don't really train people in our business we try to educate them. It's the difference between (in the old adage) giving a man a fish or teaching him to catch his own. One of the key issues that we identified was that managers didn't basically know how to manage people who handle. So we introduced a programme to show what good actually looked like so that they could correct technique on the spot - without being super qualified in anything other than to know how people had been educated in the first place. 'I'm no artist, but I know a good painting when I see it' - sort of approach. I think the OP has got a pretty good handle on this. And that genuinely was not an intended pun.