JANUARY - FEBRUARYCONSTRUCTIONTECHREVIEW.COM8CONSTRUCTION HEALTH & SAFETY - NEXT EVOLUTION By Dr Ross Trethewy, Head of Health Safety Environment, ADCO ConstructionsInternational research studies implicate design and planning as key factors in up to two-thirds of construc-tion fatalities and serious injuries. That is decisions made upstream from the construction project.Recently, in Australia, an average of 30 traumatic injury fatalities have occurred each year across the construction industry, and it currently records the second-highest number of serious injury claims at 12,500 yearly. These outcomes identify the need for a disruptive shift in thinking to exert a renewed focus on improved upstream design and planning to reduce downstream health and safety (H&S) risks in construction delivery. This would require a move away from traditional injury measures of H&S, e.g., lost time injury frequency rate. The construction industry in Australia and some clients remain preoccupied with such rates as a sole and convenient measure of performance. However, they do not provide a valid performance measure of health and safety management system integrity and, at best, remain an indicator of how injuries are triaged and managed.Such a shift in thinking may be problematic for those faced with typical delivery methods constrained within a traditional tender approach, e.g., single-stage construct-only contracts based on designs by others. This approach omits the main contractor and its subcontractors from early design and project delivery planning; therefore, any design and planning buildability innovation is relegated to the delivery and is generally constrained by strict time, cost, design, and completion parameters. Whilst designers are required to legally identify and eliminate H&S risks inherent in their design, it is often the case that focus remains on the end product and its users, not construction and temporary works design, which can often be overlooked. On the flip side, early contractor involvement (ECI) enables the main contractor to incorporate construction knowledge in the development of preconstruction phases of a project, enabling risks to design and buildability to be eliminated through improved design. The benefits to H&S from ECI were analyzed across an Australian construction contractor dominant in the defense sector over the past five years. The design, buildability, scheduling, and innovation benefits derived from ECI, the typical delivery model for this sector, resulted in H&S risks, including high potential impact notifiable incidents and injuries, decreased by a factor of four when compared with the contractor's performance across all sectors in which it undertook work across different project delivery models.The above identifies the alignment of improved H&S outcomes with improved design, buildability, scheduling, and innovation outcomes derived from the ECI model. In other words, improved H&S and other risk reduction outcomes are simply the by-product of good upstream design and planning coupled with good downstream project planning and site establishment design, including logistics and materials handling. More recent innovation using building information modeling (BIM) has further enabled the use of 4D modeling to inform improved upstream design and planning, particularly for key high-risk construction work activities, to reduce delivery risks, e.g., facade installation or tower crane design and logistics and multistorey formwork erection, from which reduced H&S risks are a key outcome.More and more H&S and other risk managers need to be technically savvy and seek out predictive data that better informs an organization of its risksIN MYOPINION
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