RIIWHS204E Work safely at heights

That’s a great question. Sure, there are plenty of other certification providers out there who will give you the standard Work Safely at Heights certification that your team needs at the end of the day. But not all competencies are created equal.

We go beyond the basics

There are a range of unduly short courses available out there at the moment which offer the same certification but in less time. But a shorter course means your team ends up with fewer skills.

It’s important to not only look safe but also BE safe. Sure, your employee can take a short course and learn how to wear a harness. But if they wear that harness on the job and it’s connected wrong, and/or it’s the wrong type of harness for the situation, it’s essentially useless as the fall clearance will likely be inadequate to prevent or arrest the fall.

Our course is designed to make sure your team knows how to select, use and maintain the right gear, why it’s the right gear to use, how to connect it properly and what actions to take to successfully arrest a fall.  It also touches on the importance of having a rescue plan and suitable equipment on hand to assist in responding to a fall.

Real practice scenarios using state of the art facilities

You want to make sure that your team gets REAL experience working at heights, not just standing on a wooden box and getting a check mark for doing it. Our training facilities are absolutely state of the art and completely hands-on. Your team will undertake practical work which simulates real life scenarios using real roofs, ladders, platforms, ropes and harnesses at heights of up to 6 metres in over 795 square metres of dedicated facilities.

Highly qualified trainers

Our instructors are among the best in the industry. They bring decades of combined experience in the height safety industry to every course they teach.

We re-train all our instructors on a regular basis to ensure consistency and that they are continually improving.

Do I really need to worry about completing this certification if my team isn’t going to be working on any jobs over two (2) metres high?

In previous codes and standards, it used to be specified that if you were working within 2m of an edge and could fall more than 2m over that edge, you needed to take necessary action to prevent the fall. This would include holding the Working Safely at Heights certification, however these dimensional specifications have since been removed. Under the revised WHS legislation and codes, fall protection must be used wherever there is a possibility of a fall from one level to another that is reasonably likely to cause injury – irrespective of the distance. Therefore, even if you are working 4m away from an edge and the furthest you could fall is 600mm, and it is likely you could be injured if you fell, you need to have completed the course.

Ensuring everyone is certified has become site policy for any reputable builder or contractor as part of their Site Safety Management Plans and SWMS if there is any possible risk of a fall occurring. The certification will even cover simple tasks such as someone installing a lightbulb if there is a risk of serious injury.

At first glance, this may all seem a bit unnecessary. However, it’s a common misconception that the risk of a fall occurring when working on single or double storey structures is less of a concern compared to working on high rise structures. This is truly not the case.

Rescue plans are of course extremely important for high rise buildings. But with low rise buildings, there’s less distance and therefore less time for safety harnesses to properly arrest the fall before someone hits the ground or the next level below. A small error when setting up safety equipment on a low rise building can have catastrophic results.

So basically, if you want your team to be able to work on any job that involves any heights, they need to complete the RIIWHS204E Work Safely at Heights course.

Apart from being safer in their jobs, your employees will be able to perform a wider variety of jobs, and will actually be more productive.

As a PCBU, we understand that you want to see a real ROI if you’re going to be paying for your team to complete this course. We absolutely guarantee that your staff are going to know more about working safely at heights when they leave our course than when they arrived. They are going to be safer than ever before. Sure, they may already know a fair bit about what to do when working at heights. But they often don’t know the why behind certain procedures. History has shown that when an operator knows and understands the ‘why’ they are much less likely to take that fatal shortcut.

Once your employees know how to use all the required safety equipment and how to use it properly, they will actually work faster and more efficiently. It might take a bit longer to set up and pack down every day, but once an employee is confident in their rig, they can focus on the job and get more done.

As a PCBU, you are responsible by law to ensure that you keep your team safe at all times. If your employees don’t know if they are doing things right or wrong when they are working at heights – how are you going to know whether they are following the rules? If you can’t recognise when someone is carrying out their work in an incompetent manner, then quite frankly, you won’t be in a position to fulfil your legal obligation of ensuring a safe place of work and/or safe systems of work are both being provided and properly used.

If you’re a PCBU, we encourage you to complete our training course as well as your team members. That way, you can instruct your team when needed and help to prevent accidents occurring on your watch.

Yes! In our RIIWHS204E Work safely at heights course, we cover many things in detail. But in a 1-day course, it is impossible to cover every single type of working at heights scenario. If your business requires, we can contextualise this training for specific sites, structures or equipment that are an expansion of the minimum scope of the nationally accredited course.

Contextualised training can be completed at any of our training centres (HSE Sydney and HSE Dubbo). In most circumstances we can also complete your training course on your site, further adding specific context for your team.