What are fitness workplace responsibilities?

These policies and guidelines are designed to give direction and support to personal trainers, fitness instructors and fitness business owners to meet the nationally recognised fitness industry standards.

Exercise Professionals have a duty of care to prevent harm, which could reasonably be expected to occur in the course of providing advice or instruction to clients. The Professional Standards and guidelines we’ve developed help fitness professionals exercise their duty of care and mitigate risk.

Workplace Health and Safety Responsibilities

All employers have a legal “duty of care” to ensure the health and safety of their staff. This duty of care also requires the employer to ensure that people (other than employees) are not exposed to health and safety risks arising from the operation of the business.

Workplace health and safety legislation within all states of Australia specifies obligations for all businesses, regardless of the number of people employed or the nature of the business. Under workplace health and safety law, if you can ‘affect’ the health and safety of people in the workplace, you have a legal responsibility to implement appropriate precautions.

Fitness workplace responsibilities

• Maintaining the place of work and working environment under your control in a safe condition

• Ensuring the safe use, handling, storage and transport of equipment & substances

• Providing and maintaining “systems of work” (eg. policies and procedures) to ensure workplace safety

• Providing the information, instruction, training and supervision necessary to ensure the health and safety of employees

• Providing adequate facilities for the welfare of employees

• Ensuring that risk management procedures are implemented to identify, assess, control and monitor workplace hazards

• Ensuring that appropriate employee consultation arrangements are in place and implemented

• Ensuring that injuries are reported within prescribed timeframes and that a system exists to facilitate the return to work for injured employees.

Although workplace health and safety legislation focuses on staff safety, it also requires employers to ensure the safety of any visitors to the workplace.

Many of the measures required to protect employees will also apply to your clients. By implementing an effective workplace health and safety programme you can minimise the risk of injury to both staff and clients and reduce the likelihood of related fines and public liability claims.