First aid at work: there is no headcount rule

"How many first aiders do I need for ten employees?" is the question small employers ask most, and it has no answer. The Health and Safety Executive publishes no ratio. Its guidance says there are no hard and fast rules on exact numbers. Anybody who quotes you one — a trainer, a consultant, a poster — is inventing it. HSE covers Great Britain; in Northern Ireland the equivalent 1982 Regulations apply and HSENI is the regulator.

Nor is there a size below which none of this applies. Every employer, including one with a single member of staff, must provide an adequately stocked first aid container, appoint someone to take charge of first aid arrangements, and tell employees what those arrangements are. Being small and low-hazard changes what counts as adequate. It never removes the duty.

The requirement is an assessment, which is why no number exists

The law asks for provision adequate and appropriate in the circumstances, and you establish that through a first aid needs assessment. What it weighs:

• What the work involves and what goes wrong in it — machinery, vehicles, knives and hot surfaces, chemicals, work at height, electricity.
• How many people work there, on what patterns. Shifts, nights, seasonal peaks and holidays are what turn adequate cover into none on a particular Thursday.
• People who are not on your premises: lone workers, drivers, staff on client sites or in customers' homes.
• Where you are: a unit on a rural estate is a different problem from a shop ten minutes from a hospital. And if you share a building, is the arrangement you rely on written down or assumed?
• Employees with known health conditions, young workers, people on work experience — and the public. The regulations do not require first aid for non-employees, but HSE strongly recommends including them, and in a shop or café most people through the door are them.

HSE does not insist the assessment be written down. Write it anyway: it is the only thing showing how you reached your conclusion, and the first document an inspector or insurer asks for.

An appointed person is not a budget first aider

The appointed person needs no formal training at all. The role is to look after the kit, call the emergency services, and be available whenever people are at work, plus cover within their own competence if a first aider is unexpectedly absent. They are not there to treat anybody. Blurring the two roles is how a business comes to believe it has cover that does not exist.

EFAW and FAW answer different questions

Emergency first aid at work is one day, aimed at what kills in minutes: someone unresponsive, not breathing, choking, bleeding badly, in shock. First aid at work is three days and adds a far wider range of injuries and illnesses, plus the judgement to manage an incident lasting longer than an ambulance response. Offices and most shops commonly land on EFAW; machinery, heights, chemicals or a remote site point towards FAW. Your assessment may also identify something neither covers — a paediatric qualification, or training in recognising mental ill health.

HSE stopped approving training in 2013, so the checking became yours

Since 1 October 2013 HSE has not approved first aid training, qualifications or training organisations. Nothing is "HSE approved", and a provider advertising itself that way is claiming something that has not existed for over a decade. Equipment is the same: there is a British Standard for kits, BS 8599-1, and HSE says plainly that buying to it is not a regulatory requirement. Your assessment decides the contents.

The simplest route is a regulated qualification, from an awarding organisation a national regulator oversees: Ofqual in England, SQA in Scotland, Qualifications Wales in Wales. Ofqual's register of regulated qualifications is where to check an English one. Or a voluntary aid society — St John Ambulance, the British Red Cross, St Andrew's First Aid in Scotland. Use anyone else and you must establish yourself that trainers are competent, that the syllabus follows current Resuscitation Council UK guidelines, and that skills are genuinely assessed. The duty was never delegable: if the training proves inadequate, that is your failure, not the trainer's.

One filter saves money quickly. HSE strongly recommends that any part of the syllabus needing practical demonstration is assessed by direct observation, and the regulated FAW and EFAW qualifications require it — so a blended course is fine, theory online and the practical in a room, while a certificate issued after a video and a quiz is not the qualification you thought you were buying.

Three years, then nothing, and no grace period for cover

Certificates last three years from the day the course was completed, which is what HSE's L74 requires them to state. From the day after expiry the holder is no longer considered competent to act as a workplace first aider. If they were your only one, your cover is not reduced. It is zero.

There is a widely repeated belief that expiry comes with a month's grace. Not in the sense people mean. The shorter requalification course stays available at any time after expiry; the month is about which course is the sensible one. Past roughly a month, HSE says it may be prudent to do the full three-day course instead, and that the choice is the employer's. Either way the person is uncertified for the whole gap. Awarding organisations also differ on how early they will let somebody requalify, and on whether the new three years runs from the course date or from the old expiry — L74 has it running from course completion, so ask before you book early.

Annual refresher training is strongly recommended, not required. Take it seriously anyway: skills decay, and resuscitation guidance is revised periodically, so a first aider late in a certificate can be confidently doing something that has changed.

The expensive mistake is a rota of one

One first aider is not cover. They take holiday, work one shift in three, go off sick, resign — and in the incident that matters most they may be the casualty, or the person holding a dressing while somebody else makes the 999 call. Two trained people with staggered certificate dates is the smallest arrangement that survives an ordinary week: not because the law says two, it does not, but because one does not survive holidays and shifts.

Then put each expiry in a calendar at two years and nine months, with the person's name on it. Gaps almost never come from a decision. They come from a course booked for the month the certificate runs out, a course that fills, and four weeks in which nobody in the building is qualified. HSE's guidance for employers and the fuller L74 are where to confirm the current position.

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This is general information about how a process works, not advice about your situation. Thresholds, fees and deadlines change — check the official source linked above for the current figures, or ask a professional who can see your circumstances.