When is a first aid kit not just a first aid kit?

1 August 2019

Hastings Deering builds, sells, rents, supports and provides parts distribution services for customers across a range of heavy industries. It employs over 3,000 people across Queensland and the Northern Territory, as well as PNG and some Pacific Islands.

Widdup is based at the company’s head office in Archerfield, in Brisbane’s west, which extends over four sites and employs over 600 people. One of her many responsibilities is management of first aid kits scattered across the four sites. The company uses two different first aid kits from Alpha First Aid: around 15 industrial workplace kits located where mechanics and welders work, and 20 general workplace kits in administration areas, which are restocked every three or six months respectively.

‘Everything in first aid kits has expiry dates on them, so it’s important that all items are regularly checked as being fully stocked and in date. If you give that job to staff members, you have problems with people forgetting, or being too busy to do it, or with staff turnover and keeping training current’, she says.

Last year, when a new procurement team suggested an alternative, cheaper supplier of first aid kits and their contents, Widdup resisted and had to justify staying with Alpha First Aid.

In 2018, Kerry Fisher, Alpha First Aid’s western Brisbane distributor, had walked with Hastings Deering’s first-aid-trained OT across the whole Archerfield site, making a map of the location and types of first aid kits. She visits every three months and audits the contents of the kits and provides the organisation with the list of items that it needs to order – and then she delivers the stock right into each kit.

Widdup explained to the procurement team that Alpha’s distributor knows their company policies and the lie of the land when it comes to first aid kits. ‘It’s not a matter of just receiving [cheaper] supplies in a delivery van. Someone has to separate out the order into multiple kits around the site. With Alpha First Aid, everything’s done for me and I know our kits always comply with our policies.’

The company also has a fully equipped first aid room and does health monitoring of its employees every six months, so it also purchases cholesterol meters and strips, blood glucose meters, trauma kits and vehicle kits. The service level for delivery of these items is also excellent, according to Widdup.

A: When a first aid kit comes with outstanding customer service from Alpha First Aid, providing value-for-money and a compliant, safe workplace.

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