Posted By Steve Hickey Please can anyone advise? At my place of work they are about to give manual handling training to key personnel such as team leaders and safety reps. The safety manager is going to use the forklift truck trainer to do the training. He has no qualifications in the subject and in fact no safety qualifications at all. Am I correct in saying that this is a specialized subject and not one that he would be competent to train. 1)How would this training stand up in court if something happened and the company said that they had received such training. 2)Two of the safety reps have the NEBOSH cert would they be better placed to give basic advice. Again,I believe they would not. Can you advise Steve

Posted By James Kennedy I have completed a manual handling instructors and assessors course with a good specialised firm and I am now giving manual handling training to fellow employees. I cannot certify them but as far as i know once I am trained by a rep firm i can give training. Where it stands in court i am unsure. I cannot go outside the company i am with and give training to other companies tho. This must be ok as the company i am with are very very H&S minded and would not alow themselves to be caught on the wrong foot. Now having said that..i work in ireland James

Posted By Joe McNicholas Steve, I had been carrying out Manual Handling Training for about 5 years with a 'qualification' received from spending 4 hours at a business link seminar (certificated as a trainer!). Last year I spent 5 days on a Manual Handling Kinetic Handling for Trainers course run by IOSH and picked up loads more stuff. The course is 2 days on Assessment and 3 days on the training side (I still need convincing that the assessment is required to be a trainer). The 3 days on training was excellent and yes I would recommend it to anyone. FLT trainers are good training people on FLT's not Manual Handling. I had a NEBOSH Cert but only after the Manual Handling Course did I realise how little I knew. I would recommend you book an IOSH course for one of the Nebosh cert people and let them do the training. (If that doesn't get me a free subsrciption to IOSH, I don't know what will!) Regards Joe

Posted By Bob Youel Steve: To be credible training[of any sort] must be carried out by a person who is qualified and experienced in providing training and they must know their subject. 'Qualified' does not mean 'I have been doing this for years' it means that a person understands human psychology and how we learn [attentive, cognative, psycomotive and experiential learning techniques etc.] Should an accident happen a company would fail in its defence if the trainers were not competent. Manual handling is a subject that is regarded as a specialist subject and there are specialist courses provided for trainers.