COSHH Awareness

There is almost certainly a hazardous substance within arm’s reach of you right now. The bleach under the sink, the toner in the printer, the fine dust thrown into the air when someone cuts a length of timber. The Control of Substances Hazardous to Health (COSHH) Regulations 2002 are the law that stops all of it from quietly making you ill, and this course teaches you how to spot it, read the warnings, and work around it safely.

People tend to picture chemical hazards as barrels in a factory. In reality COSHH follows you into the office, the kitchen, the ward and the building site. If your work brings you anywhere near chemicals, dust, fumes, mists or germs, it applies to you, and knowing the basics is what keeps a routine job from turning into a long-term health problem.

Who it’s for

• Office workers, cleaners and hospitality staff
• Manufacturing, warehouse and construction workers
• Anyone who uses, stores or works near chemicals, dusts, fumes or biological agents
• Supervisors bringing COSHH awareness to a new team
• No previous training needed to start

What you’ll come away able to do

• Explain what the COSHH Regulations 2002 ask of both employers and employees
• Recognise a hazardous substance in any of its forms: chemical, dust, fume, mist or biological agent
• Read the standard CLP hazard symbols and the two signal words at a glance
• Name the four ways a substance gets into the body, and tell an acute effect from a chronic one
• Use a Safety Data Sheet, the COSHH risk assessment, the hierarchy of control and PPE the way they’re meant to be used

How the course works

Six focused lessons, each split into short topics with a quick game to make the ideas stick. The lessons sit inside three modules, and every module closes with a 10-question check pulled at random from a bigger bank, so no two attempts look the same (80% to pass, three goes at each). It all ends with a final exam of 20 questions drawn from a pool of 40 across the whole syllabus. Pass, and your CPD-standard certificate, complete with your name and a verifiable reference code, is issued on the spot and saved to My Account → Certificates.

Access runs for 12 months, on any device, with your certificate ready to download the moment you finish.

Worth being clear about: this is a knowledge-based awareness course. It gives you the grounding to work safely with hazardous substances, but it doesn’t replace your own workplace’s COSHH risk assessment, task-specific training, or the Safety Data Sheets for the products you actually handle.

Course content

• Welcome & how this course worksLesson
• What is COSHH?Lesson
• The law behind itTopic
• What COSHH covers, and what it doesn’tTopic
• 🎮 Practice: Is it covered by COSHH?Topic
• Identifying Hazardous SubstancesLesson
• The hazards hiding in plain sightTopic
• How the form changes the dangerTopic
• 🎮 Practice: What form is the hazard?Topic
• Module 1 Assessment — Introduction to COSHHQuiz
• Understanding Hazard SymbolsLesson
• The CLP pictogramsTopic
• The two signal wordsTopic
• 🎮 Practice: What kind of hazard?Topic
• Routes of Entry & Health EffectsLesson
• How substances get into the bodyTopic
• Acute effects versus chronic effectsTopic
• 🎮 Practice: Which route of entry?Topic
• Module 2 Assessment — Hazard Symbols & Health EffectsQuiz
• Information & Risk AssessmentLesson
• Safety Data Sheets (SDS)Topic
• The COSHH risk assessmentTopic
• 🎮 Practice: Order the COSHH risk assessmentTopic
• The Hierarchy of Control & SafetyLesson
• The hierarchy of controlTopic
• Storage, disposal and emergenciesTopic
• 🎮 Practice: Order the hierarchy of controlTopic
• Module 3 Assessment — Risk Assessment & ControlQuiz
• Course summary & what nextLesson
• Final Exam — COSHH AwarenessQuiz