First Aid courses for church staff and volunteers

All Churches need to be prepared should someone fall ill or injure themselves at the Church.

The Church has a duty of care over anyone that visits, from parishioners to volunteers to children at Sunday School or at similar activities.

If the Church employs anyone then you must also comply with the Health and Safety (First Aid) Regulations. For instance you may need to:

Provide adequate and appropriate first aid equipment and facilities
Provide a suitable number of qualified first aiders
Appoint a person to take charge where first aiders are temporarily absent or the provision of first aiders is not necessary (due to the nature of the activities; the number of employees; and location)
Inform employees and volunteers of the first aid provisions made – including the location of any equipment or facilities and the identity of the first aider(s) or appointed person(s).

Generally speaking, to determine what is required the Church must carry out a Risk Assessment and draw up an appropriate plan to provide this cover. There is some useful information on the Ecclesiastical insurance webpage:

Click here (PDF opens in new tab).

Which course to choose?

The main courses that you can choose for a typical Church are:

Emergency First Aid at Work, which covers the Workplace requirements, but doesn’t deal with looking after children, nor does it cover medical events such as strokes (it does cover heart attacks).

Emergency Paediatric First Aid which deals with children and infants (infant First Aid requirements are not usually needed for a church as they will be supervised by parents) but not workplace requirements.

As you can see, to cover all bases, staff and volunteers may need to attend two courses and there is a lot of overlap in their syllabuses, leading to a lot of repetition.

4 Minutes Training has created a First Aid for Churches course that takes the best of these two syllabuses.

Click here to read more and to enquire