About Acorn Health and Safety

Acorn Health and Safety provides training and consultancy in First Aid, Fire Safety, Food Safety and Manual Handling.

Acorn is now into its second decade of trading, providing health and safety training and development activities to over 17,000 people a year and serving over 350 different organisations around Bristol, the South West and across the UK.

Acorn has built its enviable reputation through dedication and commitment to excellence and outstanding customer service, evidenced by a very high level of repeat business from very satisfied customers.

Many people are interested in how the Acorn business started, grew and where it plans to go in the future, and our journey is summarised below. We appreciate you taking the time to get to know us better.

The Acorn Story

tree at sunset Following a successful 10 year career in the NHS in training and development several events triggered Danny Street to start Acorn Health and Safety in 1999. Significant changes in the NHS, marriage and a desire to share skills and knowledge with a wider audience, were the main ones.

Like many businesses (often the best in our experience!) our formative years were spent working in a spare bedroom in a terraced house with a single sided copier and equipment in every room…

Danny continued to pursue his passion of excellence in first aid resuscitation and manual handling training having gained considerable experience in the NHS and through the Red Cross working at a regional and national level.

Working primarily in the health and social care sector, we provided statutory training to staff members working in a variety of settings. Our grounded and pragmatic approach combined with our commitment to make training interesting led to our attracting new clients from a variety of different business sectors.

Acorn's early years

Now referred to by those closest to us as ‘Sapling Safety’, Acorn moved premises into rented office accommodation with access to a training room in 2002. Here we were able to run scheduled monthly courses thus appealing to much wider section of the business community and were joined by two part time administrators and appointed our first full time employee, Nigel Braybrooke, now our training manager.

The health and safety consultancy side of our business was created to provide access to competent health and safety advice for many organisations with whom we now had regular contact.

In 2004 we became a limited company and Sarah Street joined the business formally as a Director whist continuing to work part time in critical care in a Regional ITU. Sarah’s growing involvement with the business played a significant part in our next step and in 2008 we moved to our own premises in Warmley, with our own training room. Acorn Health and Safety now had a home.

Acorn Today

Today Acorn provides training and development activities to over 17,000 people a year working in over 350 different organisations. We continue to grow as both a consultancy business and training organisation and although Bristol remains our home we’ve the capacity to provide training nationally and internationally.

We’ve a dedicated team of over twenty staff members all of who have a commitment and passion for health and safety, masses of experience and all qualified within their respective fields. We’ve achieved ISO 9001:2008 accreditation, are both a CIEH and IOSH accredited training centre and maintain our own HSE approval for the provision of first aid at work training.

As a leading provider of Health and Safety in the South West of England we are able to offer breadth and depth in our range of courses and consultancy. We now facilitate over fifty different courses and provide retained consultancy services to a variety of different businesses, from charities and private hospitals to builders, electricians and plumbers.

Acorn's future direction

Having gained so much in 10 years, most of which has been achieved by word of mouth alone and a solid platform from which to move forward we’ve some ambitious plans for growth in the next few years.

Acorn continues to make safety interesting through our grounded and pragmatic approach allowing us to provide the very best training and consultancy services. We strive constantly to look at ways of adding value to customers and continually invest in our business embracing advances in technology to better the overall customer experience.

Whatever your Health and Safety needs you can be confident in the training and advice from Acorn.

Contact us today to see how Acorn can help you meet your health and safety obligations, skills and accreditations requirements and reduce your risk, in a cost effective and friendly way.

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Staff

Danny Street

Danny is the co-director of the business and worked in both retailing and the NHS before establishing Acorn Health and Safety in 1999. He takes the lead role in health and safety training and consultancy together with moving and handling.

Sarah Street

Sarah is also a co-director of the business and is a registered nurse with particular experience in Intensive Care. Sarah provides input into both first aid, defibrillation, and moving and handling training.

Adrienne Cox

Adrienne (Did) is one of our moving and handling consultants. She has worked for many years in the NHS as a district nursing sister and more recently a full time moving and handling trainer based in South Wales. Did's main areas of expertise include training and risk assessment

Tony Dineen

Tony is our fire safety trainer taking the lead in developing and delivering a variety of fire related course programmes, he also instructs on first aid courses. Tony is also our business development manager.

Nigel Braybrooke

Nigel served as a Petty Officer (Catering) with the Royal Fleet Auxiliary and as a Constable with Avon and Somerset Police before moving into Hospitality Management where he worked for a number of the larger hotel groups before becoming Food Production Manager at Southmead Hospital, Bristol.

Nigel became involved in full time education as an Assistant College Lecturer in Food Safety as well as an Instructor in First Aid and related subjects.

Adele Brown - Adele qualified and practiced as an enforcing Environmental Health Officer (specializing in food and health & safety) before working in the NHS. Her areas of interest include the food industry, retail, offices, healthcare and personal safety/ security.

Paul Dineen - Paul was a senior Fire Officer with South Wales Fire Service, prior to working as a private consultant. He specialises in fire safety risk assessment in the UK and for major tour companies worldwide. Paul also provides fire safety advice and planning for healthcare trusts, residential care premises, schools, factories and commercial premises.

Paul is a Graduate of the Institution of Fire Engineers and a PAS79 2005: Accredited Fire Safety Risk Assessor

Neil Jones is a Health, Safety, First Aid and Fire trainer/advisor. He has come from a large corporate company where he worked for 21 years.

Trudi Worlock is our Office Manager. She has come from a large transport solutions company and has ISO and quality auditing skills

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Examples of Customers

Our customer data base is quite varied. We work with numerous organisations throughout the South West of England from small developing SME's through to large national companies. Our customer portfolio includes: -

SERCO
North Somerset Council
BANES Social Services
North Somerset Primary Care Trust
RNID
Bristol City Council
Constellation Europe
Frydays Fish and Chip Shop, Littledean

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Benefits to Customers of Expertise Across a Range of Subjects

Jack of all trades master of none? This was one of our main concerns as we started to develop a rapidly expanding course portfolio. Would we simply be jumping on the band wagon, offering cut price training and saying yes to everything or could we really offer a total commitment to quality?

A Primary Care Trust approached us (on recommendation) in 2001 requesting information of first aid and moving and handling training, we quoted and were contracted to provide a series of courses over a 12 month period...

In 2003 the same Primary Care Trust was looking for a provider for a number of other courses, we quoted and were once again contracted to provide them...

In 2004 we now provide the Primary Care Trust with a comprehensive range of health and safety training and consultancy. This includes

Food safety
Health & Safety for senior managers
AED, BLS and First Aid training
Fire safety and risk assessment training
Infection control
Manual handling training and consultancy

Benefits to customer...

A fixed daily rate for all courses
A single point of contact for general administration
A provider who really knows and understands their business
A single point of contact for all course bookings
A single point of contact for all finance enquiries
An honest, quality and reliable provider

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Quality Assurance

We are committed to providing quality, reasonably priced training, development and consultancy. From an initial enquiry through to the completion of a contract our aim is simply to meet the needs and expectation of our customers.

To facilitate this we have developed a number of procedures designed to measure, monitor and improve our performance. These include: -

Course booking and general administration
Course evaluation and customer feedback forms
Internal and independent monitoring of our course tutors
Regular communication with our customers

Acorn Safety is ISO 9001 accredited. We are committed to providing a high quality of customer service both prior to, during and after training or consultancy. In addition

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Business Referral Network and Business Associations

Acorn Safety are proud to be members of BNI Bristol Compton, a Bristol based professional business networking organisation

If you would like to find out more about our meetings Click here to visit www.bni-bristolcompton.com website.

business west logo Federation of Small Businesses Logo Acorn Health and Safety are members of Business Link, Business West and the South Gloucestershire Chamber of Commerce and work with a variety of organisations from small businesses to large national companies throughout the South West and beyond.