Introducing ...            The 2009 Employees Pandemic Preparedness Course HR GUIDE  A short guide to this web-based course. Course objectives are to train employees on hygienic practices and behaviour in a workplace during pandemic conditions         This course focuses on reducing the amount of fear-based absenteeism by engaging your employees in a constructive learning process designed to make them feel safer in their working environment. REALITY CHECK - July 09. The H1N1 virus amongst us now appears to be a mild version.  Last time  H1N1 create a global pandemic, it started off with a mild version too but when it returned some months later, it was extremely severe as we all know. The reality is that we simply do not know what this virus will do as it continues its transgenic drift (morphs).   However, it is 2009 and many of us are vaccinated against seasonal flu viruses, so that may assist enormously.  We can only wait and see how this virus will change or if it will grow stronger.  What we do know is that it will be with us all for the next few years as it rolls around the planet. This short web-based course provides HR with a tool to: change employee attitudes and personal behaviours through empowerment embed a pandemic focused hygiene regime into your workplace build a barrier of hygiene skills to be used if a severe form of the H1N1 virus arrives in our workplaces.   Working in small teams, your personnel are swiftly and simultaneously trained in a process that will result in a company wide pandemic hygiene programme being planned, constructed and put into place.  As each company section works through the course, they are progressively building the stages of their own their own unique workplace hygiene plan.   Once  this company-wide barriers to infection is in place, it will minimize the spread of the virus.  It is this barrier that will go a long way to giving your employees confidence to continue to come to your workplace. By the time each team has finished the course: Each member will have developed a high level of awareness of the threat Each employee team will have created a strong hygiene regime Each hygiene programme will be unique to their specific workplace conditions within each company bringing ownership and control to each team Each employee team will have worked together to embed the programme into their processes..   Each team member will have gained the knowledge of how to protect themselves, their families and your business.  *New Zealand Research 2006: