V2All Hospitality venues need to be prepared should someone fall ill, or injure themselves at the establishment, whether Pub, Hotel or Restaurant – permanent or pop-up Hospitality venue.

Your venue has a duty of care over anyone that visits, from staff to diners and residents.

As your venue has employees 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 Hospitality Business must carry out a Risk Assessment and draw up an appropriate plan to provide this cover. There is some useful information on the Health and Safety Executive website:

https://www.hse.gov.uk/firstaid/

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Which course to choose?

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

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

First Aid at Work, which builds on Emergency First Aid at Work to include medical emergencies, bone and muscle injuries amongst other problems.

Emergency Paediatric First Aid which deals with children and infants (infant First Aid requirements are not usually needed for a Hospitality venue as they will be supervised by parents) but not workplace requirements. If you do consider this useful (say you have a play area), then some Training Providers can combine this course with one of the above.

Mental Health First Aid. Working in hospitality is very customer facing and issues can arise from time to time. Hours are long, and the work can be very intense. By providing Workplace Mental Health First Aiders support can be available when required.

Contact us if you believe that you need any of these courses.

In general, most individual Hospitality sites can probably be covered by Hospitality Staff taking the 1-day Emergency First Aid at Work course. Larger venues or higher risk venues (such as a venue with a large outside area and/or fire pits may wish to consider the 3-day First Aid at work course.

When considering how many staff need training you must allow for staff leave and sickness – as well as the First Aider falling sick or injuring themselves. Also consider the size of the venue, whether it is spread out and consider spreading first aid skills across departments – kitchens, Front of House, Housekeeping for example.

Hospitality First Aid Kits

Are your First Aid kits up to date and complete? If not, look at our Hospitality First Aid kits for sale.