Safety Training Program

About the Program

Category: Risk and Emergency Management (Best in Category)

Year: 2011

Chesterfield County Government and Public Schools have approximately 12,000 employees, which forces the county to bear the burden of a constant risk of injuries and incidents involving county or school employees. The Chesterfield County Risk Management Department, working in conjunction with Chesterfield University, developed and implemented a Safety Training Program (STP) in an effort to help manage the risk and reduce the overall cost and frequency of “lost time” workers’ compensation claims as well as employee injuries. The program provides employees with several ways to become more aware of the hazards they face on the job, as well as methods regarding how to best protect themselves from these hazards. Some of the key features of the program include safety training through the new employee orientation program, an intricate matrix for initial and refresher training of employees, incident-based retraining (ladders, chainsaw safety, etc.), and monthly workers’ compensation statistics that are sent to all county departments and schools. The crown jewel of the program, however, is the matrix that was developed to help keep track of initial and refresher training. The matrix provides a color-coded key for the necessary frequency of required training classes: green requires annual training; yellow requires training every two years; red requires training every three years; white requires one time training; and blue requires initial training and refresher courses as needed. The matrix further differentiates among required training, position-specific training, elective training, and training strongly recommended by the Risk Management Department. Since the implementation of the STP, the county has seen the overall trend for regulatory training compliance improve, over 7,974 students trained with a total of 11,594 student hours, and only a minimal operation cost has been incurred.