Workplace safety construction sites

This brief overview has been considered here in order to illustrate the importance of how we talk about safety. Our contemporary understandings of safety have developed and crystallised through these dominant channels - the way we perceive safety to work is highly influential, and often more so than the mundane realities of how it actually works - as well as other more specific and individual influences, and has consequently permeated through society and into its workplaces. The context of safety on construction sites is therefore made up of much more than the industry structure, ways of working and the site rules as implemented by the... 

Despite all the safety precautions taken on construction sites to prevent injury to the workforce, accidents do happen and you may be the only other person able to take action to assist a workmate. This section is not intended to replace a first aid course but to give learners the knowledge to understand the types of injuries they may come across in the workplace. If you are not a qualified first aider limit your help to obvious common-sense assistance and call for help, but do remember that if a workmate s heart or breathing has stopped as a result of an accident they have only minutes to live unless you act quickly. TTie Health and Safety (First Aid) Regulations 1981 and relevant approved codes of practice and guidance notes place a duty of care on all employers to provide adequate first aid facilities appropriate to the type of work being undertaken. Adequate facilities will relate to a number of factors such as ... 

The Health and Safety Regulations make reference to workers having a duty of care for the health and safety of themselves and others in the workplace. The Electricity at Work Regulations identify one responsible person on-site as the duty holder . This recognizes the responsibility of an electrician to take on the control of electrical safety for the whole construction site. 

The duties summarized below deal only with safe working on normal construction sites and only where they refer to matters not covered by the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992. They do not deal with particular duties covered in the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 1994, which are covered in Section 14.1, nor to the precautions necessary in specialized construction work. 

Personal protective equipment (PPE) has a twofold role in the workplace. In some cases it is a passive safety measure, used to minimize injmy if other protective measures fail. But it is also used as the main means of injttry prevention in situations where it is impossible to guarantee the effectiveness of other safety measures, e.g. penetration-resistant boot soles on a construction site, fall arrest harnesses where falls are likely to cause serious injtrry or death. 

In other joint committees, there may be either more employee participants (for example, at construction sites where several different trade unions represent employees) or more management participants (especially where safety, medical, and industrial hygiene professionals are counted as management). The top management at the workplace frequently chairs these conunittees. In other cases these committees are employees who are elected by the committee itself [7]. They work by consensus and do not take formal votes. Their usual functions are similar to those of the joint labor-management committees. 

Work at height accounts for about 50-60 deaths - more than any other workplace activity - and 4000 injuries each year. During the first two weeks of June 2003, inspectors from the Health and Safety Executive visited 1446 construction sites and stopped all work at one quarter of them due to concerns about the level of risks of falls from height. Another 5% of sites visited were issued with improvement notices. Other problems included a lack of or inadequate toe boards and intermediate guard rails on scaffolding and working platforms. 

These Regulations were made to implement the European Directive on the minimum safety and health requirements for the workplace. A workplace for these purposes is defined very widely to include any part of non-domestic premises to which people have access while at work and any room, lobby, corridor, staircase or other means of access to or exit from them. The main exceptions to these rules are construction sites, means of transport, mines and quarries and other mineral extraction sites. 

All construction sites should be evaluated for fire risk as part of best practice safety management, but the Fire Precautions (Workplace) Regulations 1997 as amended do not apply)... 

These Regulations, usually referred to as COM, implement the design and management content of the Temporary or Mobile Construction Sites Directive, which was adopted on 24 June 1992. The Directive contains two parts the first applies the Framework Directive provisions to construction sites the second refers the Workplace Directive to sites. The Construction (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1996 (CHSWR) implement the second part of the Directive. They took effect on 31 March 1995. 

Construction Material and Labour Costs. In the Australian context, reduction of site labour costs for fabrication or construction is important, owing to the relatively high influence on project execution costs that labour exhibits when compared to materials. This applies not only for direct labour, but also to indirect labour required for adequate supervision, quality control and safety management at the workplace. Hence it is common for infrastructure to be fabricated as Pre-Assembled Modules (PAM) in a location where such labour is more cost-efficient. The need for pre-assembly of structures also tends to drive designers towards size and weight-efficient steel assemblies, rather than concrete or other materials, in order to reduce freight costs. 

SHE audits are the main tools of Norskoil s SHE manager for follow-up on safety in construction. The contractor s site safety co-ordinator also performs audits of this type. The audit team checks actual performance against regulatory and contractual requirements and the yards SHE programmes. The audits usually consist of two parts, i.e. a system part and a technical part. In the system audit, the SHE manager checks SHE documentation and practices in relation to the commitments in the SHE programme. The technical audit is carried out as workplace inspection. The audits follow a schedule and each audit covers a separate theme. Below are examples of audit themes ... 

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