Construction sites are energetic and frenetic places. They are also places where the risk of accident, injury and even fatality is high. It’s the nature of the beast – heavy equipment, noise, tools, the materials in use and the site itself present many hazards.

There are more fatalities because of workplace accidents in the construction industry than any other. In 2017/18, the UK construction industry suffered 38 workers’ deaths because of workplace accidents. In addition, according to HSE construction statistics, in 2017:

• There were 58,000 work-related injuries
• 30% of these caused an absence of more than three days
• 24% resulted in an absence of seven days or longer

Though these numbers have been falling steadily in recent years, more can be done to prevent accidents on construction sites. In this article, you’ll learn five strategies to help reduce incidents on your construction sites.

What are the most common accidents on construction sites?

In 2017/18, there were 4,919 non-fatal injuries to employees on construction sites. Understanding the causes of these injuries is the first step to reducing them. The most common causes of accidents on construction sites are:

·Falls from height

In first place, and causing a third of all construction site accidents, is falls from height. Typically, these happen because of unsecured ladders or scaffolding (or failing to follow basic scaffolding regulations). Common injuries include broken bones, back injury and death.

·Slips, trips and falls on the same level

In a close second place, and the cause of 30% of construction site accidents, is slips, trips and falls on the same level. Loose cables, unmarked holes, and equipment left laying around are common reasons for these accidents. The types of injury sustained range from cuts and bruising to fatality, depending on the worker, how and where they fell, and how they landed.

·Injuries caused by handling, lifting and carrying

Typically, these types of injury are caused by poor technique or inappropriate training. Injuries may occur suddenly or over a period of time, and are most commonly either back or musculoskeletal disorders. The risk of accidents is increased by factors such as carrying loads that are too heavy, tasks involving awkward posture, and man-handling materials on uneven ground.

·Struck by moving or flying/falling objects

Materials falling from above, often when being transferred between tiers of scaffolding, are also a major cause of injury. Moving objects, such as those on cranes, can hit an injure workers, too. Typical injuries range from cuts and bruises to brain damage and death, and one of the main causes of this type of injury is poor communication.

·Vehicles

Accidents caused by construction site vehicles tend to fall into three main categories:

• Poor vehicle maintenance
• Poor driver training and work practices
• Poor communication

On construction sites, an accident involving a vehicle is likely to lead to a serious injury, leading to loss of productivity and compensation claims which the constructor is likely to lose. (See our post “Workplace transport safety checklist” for advice about vehicle maintenance to improve your health and safety processes.)

·Defective equipment

Poorly maintained tools and equipment are likely to malfunction and cause injury. If this happens, it will be deemed the owner’s responsibility. If you have supplied equipment and it causes injury because it has been poorly maintained, you will be liable for compensation.

·Excessive noise

OK, construction sites are generally noisy places. There is not a lot you can do about this – it’s not like you can reduce the noise by wrapping everything in cotton wool! However, you should provide ear defenders to help protect workers from the long-term damage caused by exposure to excessive noise.

Strategies to prevent accidents on construction sites

There are five main strategies that will help your site to reduce accidents – perhaps even become accident free.

1.      Plan to reduce the risks from on-site hazards

Before work is started, inspect the site and take action to make your workplace safer:

• Conduct a health and safety audit
• Make sure your employees understand the hazards on-site
• Carry out health and safety risk assessments
• Create a culture of health and safety in your construction business

By recognising and understanding the hazards that exist, you can plan to prevent the risks turning into accidents and injuries. This plan should be incorporated into training and team meetings.

2.      Provide health and safety training to employees and contractors

Health and safety training should be provided to all employees, no matter their experience. Give general and site-specific training to educate workers on specific risks and how to reduce them. Remember that equipment and vehicles should only be operated by trained and qualified employees.

Your training should also include training in the policies and procedures that you have produced for every job and task on-site. As part of our health and safety consultancy services here at Integral, we helps companies like yours to meet their obligations to provide health and safety training that complies with the requirements of UK health and safety laws, rules and regulations.

3.      Raise awareness with regular team meetings

Frequent team meetings are an opportunity to ensure that all workers are aware of the hazards and risks they face, and the measures and precautions they should take to mitigate them.

Make it best practice to discuss the need to be alert, discuss accidents that have occurred and how they could have been prevented, and make sure that all workers understand their role in prevention of accidents while working on the construction site.

4.      Supply personal protective equipment (PPE)

PPE is essential on construction sites, and there is a legal obligation to provide it where necessary. PPE is used as a last resort in the workplace, after all other options to eliminate the risk have been exhausted.

On construction sites, it is impossible to eliminate many hazards and risks, and so the use of PPE will help to keep your workers safe. PPE that may be required includes:

• Hard hats – to protect the head from falling/flying objects and collisions
• Hi-vis clothing – to increase visibility
• Gloves – to protect hands from sharp objects, hazardous substances, and when handling equipment and materials
• Safety footwear protective toe caps – to protect feet from heavy and sharp objects
• Safety goggles – to protect eyes from flying debris
• Ear defenders – to help prevent ear injury from excessive noise

Remember, PPE will not eliminate hazards, but is designed to reduce the seriousness of injuries should an accident occur.

5.      Keep the construction site tidy

It is difficult to keep construction sites tidy, but every effort should be made to do so. Making sure tools are stored away and that materials are not strewn around will help to prevent slips, trips and falls. Hiring a labourer to keep a site tidy could help to reduce accidents, injuries and expensive compensation claims.

Make sure, too, that scaffolding is erected properly, ladders are secured, and guardrails, toe-boards and nets are used as necessary.

In summary

The HSE has estimated that the cost of workplace injuries and work-related ill health in the construction industry totalled between £856 million and £1.27 billion in 2016/17. Around 400,000 working days are lost each year in construction because of injuries at work.

How many days is your construction business losing because of workplace-related injuries?

Contact Integral today for a no-obligation consultation, and learn how we can help you improve health and safety on your construction sites and reduce the financial impact to your business.

Whatever the size of your organisation, health and safety in the workplace is an important issue. The latest health a safety statistics published by the Health and Safety Executive show that British businesses lost more than 30 million working days in 2017/18 due to work-related illness and injuries. In 2016/17, injuries and ill health caused by working conditions are estimated to have cost £15 billion.

These eight steps serve as a health and safety blueprint that will help your company to avoid the loss of productivity and extra cost burden caused by work-related accidents, injuries and illness.

1.      Create a workplace health and safety plan

You’ll need to identify health and safety hazards and put polices and procedures in place to eliminate or reduce risks. The first step is to create an effective H&S plan, and ensure that you involve your employees. This will make sure that they understand you take their health and safety seriously and get them taking their own health and safety equally seriously.

2.      Ensure leadership

Appoint someone to lead health and safety in your company. To make it plain how important you consider H&S to be, planning and execution must be sponsored from the top. It should be visible and spoken about, with policies and practices set and performance monitored.

In smaller companies, a documented health and safety system may not be necessary. However, the actions of the business owner or senior managers should set good examples for staff to follow. In larger companies, the need to document policies and procedures is more important (and a legal requirement). Health and safety leaders will need to ensure that these policies and procedures are reviewed regularly.

3.      Carry out a health and safety audit and risk assessments

You can’t manage what you don’t measure. In the field of health and safety, this means that you must have an independent workplace health and safety audit. This will help you to determine the H&S hazards and risks in your business and if your existing policies and practices are safe and legal.

Risk assessments will aid you in identifying the level of risk of individual hazards and what actions you may need to take to eliminate or reduce those risks.

4.      Ensure Competence

From leadership, through management, and on to individual responsibility for health and safety, a company should ensure competence to undertake responsibilities. This means the people who lead the health and safety effort should have the skills, knowledge and experience necessary to do so.

Under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 (MHSWR), a company must appoint at least one competent person to help it comply with its legal requirements toward health and safety. In many cases, this may mean employing an external specialist or consultant.

5.      Train employees in health and safety

Just as you would train employees to do their job effectively, employees should be trained in health and safety pertinent to their roles. You may need to produce written policies and procedures, and make them available to your employees. Training may be provided in groups or by individual coaching, and employees will need to be supervised until competency has been assessed and confirmed. Employees should sign off to confirm that they have received health and safety training and understand what is required of them.

Remember that if correct training is not provided, you may be endangering your employees’ lives and your business.

6.      Make health and safety an everyday conversation

Put health and safety on the agenda at team meetings, one-to-ones and on your company newsletter, and create KPIs that promote health and safety in the workplace. Seek feedback, and encourage employees to share their views and ideas – you’ll be surprised how employee engagement can create impetus for identifying hazards and doing things more safely.

7.      Investigate health and safety incidents

If an incident does occur, irrespective of whether it causes injury, investigate it to find out what happened and why. This will enable you to take the actions needed to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. It may be that a hazard needs risk management revisiting, or an individual or team needs extra health and safety training. Whatever the outcome, a policy of investigating every incident will help to reinforce your commitment to improving workplace health and safety.

8.      Keep records

Keep records of all incidents, inspections, risk assessments, workplace health and safety audits, training provided, etc, etc.

Make safety a key business objective

Health and safety should not be an afterthought in any company. If you are not working to keep your employees safe from harm, you are putting them at risk and threatening the success of your business. Your employees are your most valuable resource. A commitment to their health and safety in your workplace will show that you understand this.

Ensure your company is admired for being a conscientious employer who puts the wellbeing of its employees at the top of its agenda. To learn how we can help you achieve all this with a health and safety blueprint, contact Integral Safety Management today.

Health and safety statistics published in October 2018 showed that there is still plenty to do to make workplaces safer in the UK. While the numbers of accidents and fatalities continue to fall, they still don’t make pleasant reading. Here’s a snapshot of the figures for 2017/18:

• 555,000 injuries occurred at work according to the Labour Force Survey
• 71,062 injuries to employees reported under RIDDOR
• 144 workers killed at work

In addition, 1.4 million people suffered from a work-related illness. Because of work-related illness and injury, almost 31 million work days were lost. In 2016/17, it was estimated that work-related illness and injury cost British business £15 billion. Put another way, poor health and safety at work costs British business almost twice the UK’s EU payments each year.

In this article, you’ll learn four ways to make a workplace safer.

1.      Conduct a health and safety audit in the workplace

Health and safety laws, rules, regulations and best practices evolve over time. What may have helped to keep your employees healthy and safe two or three years ago may be poor practice today. A health and safety audit in the workplace is essential to appraise your current procedures and processes and ensure they are fit for purpose and legal.

Your health and safety audit must be conducted by a competent person with the knowledge, skills and experience to do so – and they must not be one of your employees or otherwise associated with your organisation. This independence ensures a non-biased audit.

(Read more in our article “What is a health and safety audit in the workplace?”)

2.      Make sure your employees understand the most common workplace hazards

No workplace can be hazard free, but making certain that your employees understand the most common hazards and how to reduce the risks of accident and injury will help to reduce the number of days lost and associated costs. The main hazards are:

• Slips, trips and falls
• Electrocution
• ‘Caught-in’ hazards
• ‘Struck-by’ hazards

Get your employees actively involved in their own health and safety. Ask them to consider what hazards and risks there are, and have them think about how to reduce those risks.

Start the ball rolling by sending your employees a link to our article “How to protect your employees from general workplace hazards” and discussing their thoughts at your next team meeting.

3.      Carry out an HSE risk assessment

An HSE risk assessment will help you to analyse your workplace and working practices, so that you identify the risks and put in place the controls needed to minimise these risks and reduce loss, damage, or injury. There are five steps to making an effective HSE risk assessment:

1. Identify the hazards
2. Decide who is at risk

• Evaluate those risks and produce precautions

1. Record significant findings
2. Review and update

A tip here is to use an HSE risk assessment template to make sure that you cover everything needed.

(Learn more and discover an easy way to carry out an HSE risk assessment by reading this simple guide to an HSE risk assessment.)

4.      Create a culture of health and safety in your workplace

Above all else, it is essential to create a culture of health and safety in your workplace. Let your employees know that your organisation puts the health and safety of them above profit. There are a few strategies you can employ to change your workplace culture and get people thinking more about health and safety. For example:

• Ensure that H&S training is conducted at induction and then updated regularly
• Reward employees for safe behaviour and good H&S ideas that make the workplace safer
• Partner with an H&S expert to provide independent training and conduct H&S audits and risk assessments
• Ensure signage draws attention to hazards, risks and required procedures
• Put H&S on the agenda of every team meeting

Health and safety is everyone’s responsibility

If you create the right culture within your organisation, then everyone will start to take responsibility for health and safety. Your employees will become part of a workplace coalition that improves wellbeing in the workplace, reducing accidents and injuries, and cuts the cost of workplace illness and injury. Your organisation will become a more productive, happier place to work. And your organisation will be doing its bit to drive health and safety in the right direction in the UK.

Ensure your company is admired for being a conscious employer that puts the wellbeing of its employees at the top of its agenda. To learn how we can help you achieve all this, contact Integral Safety Management today.

If your employees may be exposed to a health or safety risk, it is your duty to supply them with suitable personal protective equipment (PPE). The only exception is if the risk has been adequately controlled by other means which are at least as effective. This is the law as it stands, and as described in Regulation 4 of the Personal Protective Equipment at Work Regulations 1992.

In this article, we discuss how to decide the needs for PPE for employees.

PPE in the workplace – an employer’s obligations in brief

There are certain obligations that the law places on employers with regards to personal protective equipment. These can be summarised in the following bullet points:

• PPE must only be used as a last resort

• Other methods of controlling risks and reducing hazards must be explored first, and implemented where possible

• If PPE is still needed after implementation of other controls, then the employer must provide the PPE

• The employer cannot charge employees for PPE supplied

• PPE training must be provided to employees, including how it is to be used and detection and reporting of faults

Types of PPE for employees

There are many different types and categories of PPE, and their uses depend upon the potential risks.

• Eyes are prone to injury from projectiles, gases, radiation, and chemical splashes. PPE to help protect against such risks includes safety spectacles or goggles, face shields and visors. When selecting which eye protection is best, an employer should consider which offers the best combination to protect against impact and foreign bodies.

• Ears must be protected against high levels of sound, especially if exposure is for prolonged periods. Ear defenders, earplugs and canal caps are common PPE for employees who need ear protection. A tip here is to ensure that the ear protection provided reduces the noise to an acceptable level while allowing communication to still take place.

• Head and neck injuries may be caused by bumping, impact, falls, temperature, flying objects, and hair becoming tangled in machinery. Hard hats, bump caps, hairnets and helmets offer protection against these hazards. Some safety helmets are equipped with eye and/or ear protection.

• Hands and arms may be injured by cutting, abrasion, burning (hot and cold) impact, chemicals, radiation, biological hazards, electric shocks, and so on. They are probably more prone to injury than any other body part. Gloves, gauntlets and sleeving are common PPE to protect hands and arms, though care should be taken when selecting the right hand and arm protection. Separate cotton inner gloves may need to be provided, and the material of gloves should be considered by first considering the hazard – for example, some chemicals will penetrate some materials.

• Lungs are affected by inhalation of dust, gases and vapours, and in oxygen-deficient environments. Masks or respirators may need to be provided. These should be tight fitting, with the correct type of respirator attached. Filters must be renewed regularly, and according to the manufacturer’s instructions.

• Feet and legs are susceptible to injury because of extreme temperatures, slipping, tripping and falling, cuts, chemical splashes, heavy loads, etc. Appropriate footwear to help protect against such risks include safety boots with protective toecaps, penetration-resistant boots, and other specific footwear according to workplace application.

• Whole body PPE may be required in certain working environments. These include to protect against radiation and extreme temperatures, pressure leaks from spray guns, steam, and contaminated atmospheres. Options range from disposable overalls to aprons, to chemical suits.

How do you know which PPE to provide employees?

When assessing risks and deciding on which PPE is necessary in your workplace, you should take an individual and team approach. Ask of each employee or team:

• What is the exposure to risk, and who is exposed?

• For how long is the exposure to the risk?

• What is the degree of exposure to the risk?

The PPE you provide should fit the user well, and you should provide training in its use. It is essential to make clear that PPE is limited in effectiveness – no PPE provides 100% protection against risks. Additionally:

• Ensure that all PPE supplied carries the appropriate CE mark

• If two or more items of PPE are to be used at the same time, you must ensure it is safe to do so and that they are compatible

• Never allow employees not to wear PPE – include this in their job description and employee manual

Keeping PPE in good condition

PPE degrades over time and its effectiveness is affected by wear and tear. Part of the training that is given to employees should include how to check PPE. Companies should provide a safe and adequate storage space, and ensure that there is an adequate supply of spare parts (e.g. filters for respirators).

Finally, while the employee is responsible to use PPE provided, management should monitor use and take disciplinary action where PPE is not used, or used incorrectly.

PPE for employees is the last line of protection against hazards and risks in the workplace. If you do not provide the right personal protective equipment, you could be putting the lives of your employees at risk. Your health and safety record reflects upon you as an employer.

If you are in any doubt about your needs for PPE for your employees, contact Integral Safety Management today. Our expert help will ensure that your health and safety practices remain compliant with current laws, rules and regulations, and that you provide the safest working environment possible.