Focus on health and safety: Constructing Excellence projects

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime, or so the saying goes. The same may well be true of health and safety. While it's great to have the latest safety equipment, it's irrelevant if nobody shows you how to use it properly.

With 2.2 million people working in UK construction, it is officially the biggest industry sector. But it is also one of the most dangerous, according to the latest Health & Safety Executive (HSE) figures. In the past 25 years, more than 2,800 people have died and many more have been injured working in the construction industry. So why is it that as an industry we still can't manage to look after our employees? Is it because we lack the right safety equipment or that the machinery and tools are simply not up to scratch? Or is it, in fact, that we simply don't tell each other when we actually get it right? Well that's certainly one of the contributing factors if Constructing Excellence's Demonstration Projects are anything to go by.

In 1998, Sir John Egan launched his report, Rethinking Construction, which was to set the ball in motion and change the way the construction industry operated. Crucial to the report was the message that through the application of best practices, the industry and its clients can collectively act to improve their performance. It soon became apparent that in order to do this, communication among the industry's players, both big and small was essential, and, as a result, Constructing Excellence was established to ensure that Egan's plans were put into practice.

"Traditionally, this is an industry where people come together, work on a project, and then go their separate ways," says Peter Cunningham, director at Constructing Excellence. "As a result, it makes it very difficult to utilise the learning from a particular project and share that knowledge with future projects."

"However, in recent years the model has started to change. We've seen the emergence of more partnering and framework contracts, creating greater opportunities to share knowledge and experience and apply them to future projects, driving continuous improvement throughout the entire lifetime of the framework."

Training programmes

Over the last decade, Constructing Excellence has pretty much done what it says on the tin - encourage constructing excellence. It has done this in a number of ways, including through its training programmes and networking events, but it's the organisation's demonstration projects that stand out the most.

"Through this initiative, companies put forward current projects that in one way or another are demonstrating innovation or best practice in their development," explains Peter Cunningham. "We then work alongside these leading-edge projects to capture the knowledge, benchmark their performance and use the resulting case studies to demonstrate the business case."

Open to anyone, including non Construction Excellence members, the demonstration projects are now in their 10th year and the results to date are impressive. With more than 500-plus projects having gone through the programme already, there has been a noticeable difference between the performance of the demonstration projects and the rest of the industry. In fact, the most recent key performance indicators (KPIs) collected from participants show that in terms of health and safety, the demonstrations are outperforming the industry KPIs by more than 250%.

For those projects that do demonstrate innovation or best practice in health and safety, the next steps are a site visit and the development of a case study. The case studies are then made available to all Constructing Excellence members through a knowledge sharing portal on the organisation's website.

"We developed the system a year ago following feedback from both industry and demonstration participants," says Cunningham. "We took the decision to focus more on what the market was actually after, rather than what the participants wanted to show us. This has created greater competition and has helped raise the bar in terms of the quality coming through."

With the emergence of wireless internet, site managers are left with little or no excuse as to why they can't work more closely with the more IT-savvy health and safety manager, architect or engineer. Subsequently, Blackberries and laptops look to be the next must-have accessory on construction sites after a mug of tea and a concrete covered Stereo.

"The Knowledge Base is an excellent source of best practice information collated over the 10 years since the Egan Report," says Brendan Morahan, executive board member at Taylor Woodrow. "Engaging with the demonstration programme through the Knowledge Base enables us to learn and share with our peers for the benefit of the entire industry."

While construction is still one of the most dangerous industries, there is no doubt that health and safety is improving. On average, over the past 15 years, there has been a 3.9% year-on-year decrease in the number of construction related fatalities, but there is still plenty of room for improvement. Technological advances will always play a part in improving standards, but until the industry is operated by computers and robots, human error will always be a factor. Only through sharing knowledge and exemplifying true constructing excellence can we minimise the few that still slip through the net.

Project focus: Clugston Construction

Medium-sized contractor Clugston Construction was concerned that health had often been overtaken by safety on the policy agenda. As a result, the company decided to launch an initiative to address this concern and firmly position occupational health as one of its key priorities.

Clugston formed a partnership with Team Prevent, a specialist occupational health care provider dedicated to delivering professional health screening and surveillance to help firms comply with the requirements of legislation and industry specific regulations.

Together, the partnership identified several key areas where a robust management system would help to identify and address occupational health concerns within the company.

First, it was decided to produce separate safety and health policy statements, meaning that from that point onward, health was separate from safety and now had its own identity.

The company also took the decision to identify those workers most at risk. Clugston's operatives were classified as a 'Worker' or a 'Safety Sensitive Worker' (SSW).

The difference being, a SSW worker is one that in his undertaking suffered from poor health or a health condition that could affect the safety of others.

Operatives were then required to undertake the Clugston Occupational Health Screening Programme. The results were collected and stored on a database and used to manage the findings and co-ordinate any necessary follow-ups.

To date, the programme has identified a number of cases whereby if the individual had not undertaken the on-site screen and their condition could have worsened and may have resulted in another skilled worker leaving the industry due to ill health.