The Health and Safety Event 2023

In 2022 OMS saw huge success at the NEC based Health & Safety Event and to ensure the same could be said for this year’s event, the team put lots of effort into making this years stand just as welcoming.

And that’s our conclusion; a very successful exhibition with hundreds of people being welcomed onto our stand who wanted to talk about our safety, training courses and consultancy services for their organisation.

The most popular course choices

The team like to talk training, so to be able to have a good chat about the courses people needed and the training support required to support the safety of their people and the success of their business, was fantastic.

The NEBOSH Diploma was a hot topic and discussed heavily over the three days. Unsurprisingly due to the nature of the health and safety event, and with the NEBOSH Level 6 National Diploma for Occupational Health & Safety Management Professionals being THE qualification to have under your belt to support career progression.

Another NEBOSH qualification with a high level of interest was the bespoke  NEBOSH introduction to incident investigations course. A course whereby clients are provided with the skills to identify the immediate, underlying and root causes of incidents and equipped with the necessary skills to carry out an unaided incident investigation of a non-complex incident. Popular because we can also work closely with clients to embed their own policies, procedures, and documentation so that it is relevant and easily applied in their own workplaces.

Our NEBOSH courses were not the only courses to crop up in conversations of a bespoke nature! Conversations surrounding our bespoke Risk Assessment courses and Manual Handling courses, were also very popular. With OMS, the bespoke possibilities are utterly endless!

IOSH Managing Safely and its possible delivery formats, was too a frequent enquiry on the stand, especially amid those companies who have employees spread across the country!  Live, virtual, classroom, or hybrid methods are available from OMS on a regular basis, which sent our stand visitors away very happy knowing that they can easily access a range of delivery formats.

Dave said, “There were so many interesting conversations across the three-day event, in particular those conversations that were in relation to courses that can be tailored to suit a client. As an organisation we like to tailor our courses to support our clients as best we can, bespoke being an OMS strength”.

Discussing consultancy

Assessing the skills of employees within a business that works on an international basis was a key conversation for our consultancy services.  Benchmarking customer staff capabilities in a format that enabled the clear identification of what’s required to ensure full compliance to current standards and legislation.  This is something our HR consultants can perform both virtually and in person to interview and assess 200+ of the Customer Employees before moving onto the next stage.

Another conversation centred around making the workplace safer for the people who work there, our Health, Safety, Environment and Quality consultants provide an in-depth Audit / Gap Analysis service to assess the current safety standards and culture.  Once the Gap Analysis has been completed the Consultants can then move onto producing bespoke road maps and action plans for a more compliant workplace.  This facilitates a vast improvement in productivity, reduces costs and highlights areas where further development opportunities lie for the business.

Discussion was had around what makes OMS consultancy different from the other compliance service providers, which is that we do not use off-the-shelf Processes, Procedures and Safe Systems of Work.  OMS prides themselves on going into businesses and assessing what is needed and then provides a bespoke solution, which is implemented between the Consultant and the Customer.  We then mentor the Customer through each Process or Safe System of Work, so that they then have the knowledge to manage their systems on a daily basis.

Clive noted, ‘We were proud to attend the event, and again our stand was very well received. Personally, I found The Health and Safety Event to be an extremely positive few days, speaking with many individuals about our consultancy services’

The interesting conversations

Obviously, every conversation had and everyone who visited us was a very valued and interesting interaction.  There were so many conversations had across the event but we’ve put together a few of our favourite discussions detailed below!

One visitor spoke about the complexities involved in delivering ISO Managing Safely to their 300 employees across the globe. Those challenges involve different time zones and languages. With our online portals and ability to deliver the course according to requirements this stand visitor is someone the OMS team can support by removing the complexities and providing a program that meets the needs of everyone required to attend this essential training course.

Another visitor asked us about bespoke training for their facilities management team who needed very specific health and safety training, including permit to work, risk assessments and working at heights courses. With experts in all of these areas, creating a bespoke program like this is all part of our offering.

They always say never work with animals however, this is exactly what one stand visitor does daily across two large and very busy sites. The requirements were not just to ensure the safety of their staff but for the animals too! An interesting conversation about the challenges faced in within this very abnormal environment (never mind the potential of a Tiger coming for tea). Bespoke training will be required for this establishment and we’re sure  our trainers will jump at the chance for a trip to the zoo.

Laura highlights “Our stand at the NEC was fantastic this year, we spent a lot of time and effort developing and creating this specific to OMS with our Training and Consultancy deliverables and to raise our profile – The team were so busy over the 3 days, engaging with possible clients about so many diverse solutions we could provide for them moving forward.

Also, the calibre of people and leads at the event which we were discussing were very exciting and we are hoping that these tun into successful relationships in the future for OMS.”