What is mandatory healthcare training?
Posted on 9th November 2022
Mandatory healthcare training covers the spectrum of compulsory healthcare training that is legally required for employees to work in the healthcare industry. This is to ensure they provide safe, efficient, and responsive patient care.
Healthcare training is needed to ensure that healthcare organisations and their workforces meet all local and national government guidelines while simultaneously reducing the risks associated with working in this sector. As an accredited mandatory training provider, the Leicestershire Training Team can provide professional and tailored services to empower your team and ultimately help them deliver the very best support to your service users.
Why mandatory healthcare training matters
Mandatory training isn’t simply an obligation that your business needs to tick off the checklist. For employees it is an opportunity to develop their skills, experience, and understanding of the industry. Better still, their training will be covered by the Working Time Regulations 1998 Act, meaning it counts to their weekly hours.
For employers, it is a chance to avoid a range of potential problems to keep the company on a smooth path to success. Rather than thinking about the cost of training your team properly, it may be better to think about the potential repercussions of overlooking it. Some of the potential issues are detailed below:
Patients could be harmed
Mandatory healthcare training should extend to all carers, nurses, administrators, home managers, and relevant workers. Ultimately, the main incentive revolves around providing better patient care. Sadly, if just one worker is not sufficiently trained to handle situations, patient welfare could be severely compromised.
Suitable training can cover everything from simple issues like hand hygiene to crucial procedures like PEG care or administering medicine. Whether it’s preventing accidents or knowing how to respond to incidents, mandatory training is essential.
The British Journal of Medication has shown that over 200 million medication errors happen every year in the UK. Ensuring your staff are trained can help prevent your organisation adding to this statistic and harming a service user you support.
Companies may suffer data breaches
Digital communications are an increasingly important part of the job for millions of healthcare workers. Without adequate training in clinical record keeping, information governance, and data governance, the business will be vulnerable to potential threats. Given the sensitive nature of medical records, the fallout can be horrific.
A quick look at the biggest medical data breaches will quickly highlight the potential severity of the issue and underline the need to avoid this problem. Mandatory training is an essential precaution that can minimise the threats to your business, its employees, and the patients whose data you hold.
Whether the data stolen includes a patient’s payment info or not, the impact for them is devastating. Guilty healthcare companies can also face fines.
Staffing Issues
Suitable healthcare training is additionally a vital ingredient in the recipe for successfully managing internal teams. Feeling undervalued and overwhelmed are the main reasons why workers quit their roles. A lack of training is one of the key contributing factors behind the high staff turnover rates.
Meanwhile, over 40% of healthcare workers state that they would work harder if they were happier. Mandatory training makes them feel more assured in their roles, which ultimately encourages a better response on a daily and long-term basis. Staff training additionally gives employees empathy towards colleague workloads.
Staffing issues within the healthcare sector have been rife before, during, and after the pandemic. Training helps combat this while also showing workers they have a future.
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