Keeping up the standards

27 Sep 2021

Jim Martin, Managing Director of Hydraskills Training based in Aberdeen – one of the primary trainers for the Association’s courses – discusses the importance of quality training in order for users of fluid power equipment to remain legally compliant, efficient and safe.

The BFPA’s suite of training courses are proving increasingly popular with companies of all sizes and in all key industry sectors, with the total number of trainees trained now standing at over 10000. I was instrumental in compiling the curriculum for the Small Bore Tubing Integrity and the Pressure Testing courses based on my own hands-on experience within the oil & gas industry, a sector in which I have been operating for 48 years. Much of Hydraskills’ training is conducted in conjunction with clients from the oil & gas sector who focus on hydraulic hose replacement together with hose management. Clients’ personnel need to be able to manage the flexible hoses on all installations safely, so the BFPA’s Hose Integrity, Inspection and Management course, together with aspects of the Foundation Safety, Hose Integrity, Inspection and Management, Hydrostatic Proof Pressure Testing course and Small-Bore Tubing Integrity courses are often featured during training.

The right background

A recent assignment saw my client gaining additional business and expanding the company due largely to the expertise of his staff combined with the level of training being provided to them. The client was driven by quality and by professionalism and sets an extremely high standard. The client has just fitted out a new workshop, taking inspiration from myself together with some other people on how the workshops should ideally be set up to operate at a very professional level, as well as looking attractive for staff and visiting customers, meeting the highest standards of cleanliness to avoid the risk of further contamination. From the Association’s perspective, this client sees the BFPA’s courses as the best qualifications available for his staff.

Widening the format

As COVID-19 became an increasingly formidable challenge for everyone during 2020, the BFPA discussed the format of the existing courses with myself and the outcome was that together we would reconfigure some courses to be presentable in an online format. To our mutual delight, this format has proved to be a major success, both in terms of uptake and enquiry levels. This has become truly global, serving companies everywhere from Trinidad, Kazakhstan and Indonesia, to Norway, Houston in Texas US and all over the UK. This is a format I have personally been used to working in for some time, but it has just gone to a completely different level now.

Recertification

Another area of ongoing training I am active in involves course recertification when the existing course qualification has expired. The BFPA decided that the skills course would expire after a three-year period, and the pressure testing course after two years because the dangers that are involved in pressure testing are higher. So, we need to monitor people’s ability and skills more regularly if they work with systems under pressure for them to continue to adhere to best practices and from a health & safety perspective.

Health & safety focus

Regardless of the course I am teaching at any given time, I focus on how to remain safe when using equipment under pressure. It is important to get across basic practical principles such as the importance of not re-ending hoses, fitting the right ends to the right type of hoses and so on. Moreover, we believe one of the biggest topics in terms of health & safety is how to mitigate fluid injection injury risk and what to do if you are unfortunate to suffer such an injury. Some of images shown to trainees can be quite graphic, but I feel it is important to get the message across that these injuries should be avoided at all cost.

Advance logistical planning

Another point worth emphasising is the importance of knowing in advance which hospitals and medical centres in your area can treat fluid injection injuries. Check the capabilities of your local medical facilities now because not all of them will likely have the means or knowhow to treat a pressure injection injury. Forward planning can save you from wasting time and sustaining a more serious outcome as a result. You only have a small window of time to get treated; that is important to remember.

Guidance

In addition to the detailed practical and theory-based information available to trainees in the course booklets, I would like to point out the importance of other BFPA publications such as the convenient pocket-sized booklet on Fluid Injection Injury. The booklet is an invaluable guide to people who build, use and maintain equipment containing fluid under pressure. We promote the booklet during our training programmes and speak about many of the themes mentioned within it. For example, we talk about parts of machinery that people on the courses are often very familiar with. Then, the penny drops and they realise they could sustain an injection from trapped pressure in a particular piece of equipment. As you would expect, this generates a lot of interest. This is good, solid knowledge that can help to save serious injury or even lives in extreme cases. In conclusion, the right level and quality of training is critical for people in the fluid power industry to remain legally compliant and safe, whether building, operating or maintaining equipment. This is the reason why BFPA courses will continue to be both invaluable within a wide variety of industry sectors.

This article appears in the 2021 BFPA Yearbook