A lot of businesses book first aid training to tick a box. The certificate goes in a folder, the folder goes in a drawer, and everyone hopes the day never comes when someone has to use what they learned. Sometimes the day comes anyway, and a certificate has never resuscitated anyone.
We train workplace first aiders across Hampshire, Dorset and Wiltshire, and the difference we care about is not whether someone passes. It is whether they would actually step in. Knowing the steps and doing them when a colleague is on the floor are two different things. One is memory. The other is confidence under pressure, and that only comes from practising the real thing rather than watching a slideshow about it.
That is why our sessions are hands on. People kneel down and do the compressions for real, and they walk through the whole scene: who calls 999, who fetches the defibrillator, who meets the ambulance. It is not comfortable, and it is not meant to be. The first time someone does chest compressions should not be on a real person.
There is a business case here too. A team that has genuinely rehearsed an emergency loses less time to panic and recovers faster when something goes wrong on site. Compliance is the floor, not the ceiling. Meeting the Health and Safety regulations is the least a good course should do.
If your certificates are coming up for renewal, or you were never quite sure the last course stuck, it may be worth asking a different question. Not whether you are compliant, but whether your team would actually act. If you are not confident of the answer, that is the thing worth fixing. We are happy to talk it through.