Make time for safety

Paternoster is a huge project. There are 1,200 people working on it at the moment. Accident statistics for each of the three buildings, which run like three projects, are recorded independently. We put one set of statistics up in the project site offices, one downstairs in the site entrance area, so that everyone can see them, and a shorter version up in the canteen. Communication is key
I know that on some sites it can be a problem to get the men to report accidents but I don’t think we have that trouble here. What I explain to people at the induction is that if they don’t report an accident and they have trouble a few years down the line, then they won’t be able to get any financial help. The other good thing about the project directors here is that if someone has had an accident or is off sick, they will call them to enquire genuinely if the person is feeling OK. By law we have to record all accidents where people are off for three days or more. Then we record all lost time incidents. We then split these in two ways – by type of injury and by specialist contractor – and display them on coloured pie charts to make them easy to understand. Leagues ahead
We try to find ways of cutting the injuries down. For example, hand and finger injuries are a big problem and it can be difficult for contractors to keep up with the new types of glove which are continually in development. So I can let them know about alternatives. The third set of statistics we keep is the specialist contractors’ safety league. The site teams score the contractors out of five for five categories. Scores vary. For example, in one of the latest set of results, the highest score is 23, the lowest 16. We call in the directors of the low-scoring firms for a meeting, to talk about the problems and look at ways they can improve. You usually find that the next time there will be a vast improvement. No bosses like their firm to have a poor safety record. Finding the pattern
The other thing we do here is to look at when accidents happen, by day and by time of day. There isn’t a strong pattern emerging from the weekday records, but our time of day chart shows that 11am to 12pm is the most common time for any incident to occur. I think that’s because people are rushing to get a job finished before the lunch break. We need to talk to the contractors and ask them to be more flexible with lunch break times then someone can spend an extra 15 minutes finishing off and know he can finish lunch 15 minutes later without getting into trouble. The other important recording device for safety issues is my digital camera. Although the main thing is to stop unsafe things going on at the time, it is useful to have a photographic record because sometimes people try to deny what happened.

All work-related fatal, major and over three-day injuries are required to be reported under RIDDOR to HSE’s Incident Contact Centre (ICC). Details are given at the website address www.riddor.gov.uk, including details of the type of injury which is classed as ‘major’. Perhaps lesser known reporting requirements include those for Dangerous Occurrences, such as a crane overturn; and diseases, such as occupational dermatitis and hand-arm vibration syndrome. These are significantly under-reported, and HSE has to resort to the results of Labour Force Surveys (an annual survey of households) to get a better idea of the level of ill health in industry. Notify
Under-reporting also affects accidents, and there is evidence that this is increasing in construction. It is therefore particularly important that all reportable accidents are notified, otherwise HSE’s ability to assess the major causative factors in accidents is diminished. The ICC website also gives details of records to be kept in the case of an injury, disease or dangerous occurrence. All organisations should be gathering further information as a part of their effective health and safety management systems; and you should be recording the ‘good news’ of achievement - not merely adverse events that are simply measures of failure. There are already tools there to assist you, including the Respect for People Toolkit and the HSE’s Climate Survey Tool. The Respect for People toolkit provides a range of easy to use scorecards that help you to assess your current performance on health, safety, welfare and a range of other issues. You can use it to benchmark performance between sites and with others. The toolkit is downloadable at www.rethinkingconstruction.org/rc/respect/toolkits/default.asp. The Health and Safety Climate Survey Tool measures employee views on health and safety within your organisation and is designed to help you effectively manage health and safety risks in your business. Visit www.hsebooks.co.uk and request a copy of leaflet MISC 097 for more information. Tools for the trade
The Respect for People Toolkit and the HSE Climate Survey Tool provide a sound basis for analysing a basket of health and safety performance indicators. The underlying circumstances and reasons for your reportable incidents and ‘near misses’ add a further dimension. For most large organisations, analysis of the circumstances of accidents can prove useful in identifying particular high risk activities or common causes of accidents. Action taken to reduce these incidents can then lead to efficiency gains and cost savings. Such companies generally include non-reportable accidents in their analyses to produce more significant findings and often encourage the reporting of minor accidents for that reason. This approach presents difficulties for smaller companies as they invariably have too few accidents to meaningfully analyse. They are therefore either reliant on HSE figures or those from trade and other associations. HSE provides information on common causes of accidents and their avoidance in the publication “Health and Safety in Construction (HSG150)”. The recently published “Statistics for fatal and major injuries in the construction sector to workers” http://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/pdf/rhscon.pdf gives details of injuries by occupation. Most of this derives from RIDDOR data, so this is a good basis for an analysis; however, additional information such as the nature of the project (eg, new build, refurbishment, domestic, commercial) and time on site, can also provide useful information on factors affecting the likelihood and type of accident. Trade and other associations could perform a valuable service by encouraging their members to report accidents and cases of ill health so that they can be analysed and the results fed back to their members. Recent research by HSE, which is due to report shortly, should assist in defining the information which is most valuable for such analyses, and will be published this year.”

Firstly, accidents (and cases of work-related ill health) are failures of the safety management system in place, so if they indicate anything they give a measure of the ‘unsafetyness’ of the site safety arrangements. Get systematic
Secondly, in order to correct the failures of the safety management system in place, a thorough investigation of such accidents and cases of ill health that have occurred is of the first importance – but this is rarely done properly in our industry. More often than not we look only at the primary cause of the accident or incident and not at the variety of underlying causes that have contributed to it. It is rare for employers or organisations to take the time and effort to identify the root causes of accidents, and, regrettably, we are often focused on the issue of blame rather than cause. Thirdly, it is quite wrong to exclude from regular investigations the subject of work-related ill health, which results in far far more deaths, disablement and time off work than the consequences of accidents. Near misses count
If you are going to put together the full picture on the shortcomings of the safety management system then you must also try and gather information on ‘near misses’. These are accidents that could easily have happened but for some chance factor, and these are just as much learning opportunities in themselves. It is very curious that in the UK there is a legal duty to report certain accidents and incidents but no legal duty for employers or others to actually investigate any of these accidents. With the horrendous levels of under-reporting of accidents and the apparent inability of the HSE to do anything about this, combined with the fact that accidents are, in the main, poorly investigated, it is not surprising that the whole construction industry is a poor learning organisation and repeats so many mistakes of the past. My advice is to shift the emphasis to the business of improving the proactive up-front preventative measures that are in place. Proactive people know that the real measure of safety is based on the continuing evaluation and improvement of the worth of the safety management system. Measuring safety by counting the accidents is largely a waste of effort, as is any management safety evaluation based on the absence of injuries. Accidents and cases of ill health result from persons’ exposure to risk – that’s where you should start.