Occupational safety in the construction industry

This reviewed “scientifically significant” construction research to highlight the findings related to safety & risk within the industry. 326 scientific journals were included and divided under 11 categories.

WAY too much to cover, so I’ll cover a few findings.

Results:

For accidents, falls represent the main fatal accident risk, with shocks, crushing or hit by moving objects also leading causes.

Minor incidents without absence from work largely had different reasons (cuts, trips etc.).

Further, risk for high consequence accidents is higher in small companies compared to larger & higher for subcontractors.

For individual factors, gender, age & language skills were commonly discussed. Men are at greater risk than women, but all of the studies neglected to mention what types of tasks men & women were performing. Some studies showed women typically performed more administrative tasks.

Impact of age is variable across research. In most countries younger age groups have more accidents in general but severity of accidents seems to increase with age where “The increased experience that comes with age cannot fully compensate for the age factor’s impact” (p3).

Multiple psychosocial factors & sleep factors also impact performance & safety.

For legislation & regulatory governance, one finding related to OHSA is that they have typically focused inspection resources on larger construction companies, meaning that “the really problematic areas – usually the work carried out by smaller subcontractors in smaller construction projects – ended up in the background” (p4). Similar findings were found in a Danish & Australian study.

Under ‘risk management’, research was discussed highlighting significant accident underreporting across industries where up to 81% of accidents weren’t reported.

Authors note that despite the prevalence of risk analysis & assessment tools in construction, many have a simple and pragmatic focus but may be insufficient for systematic use. Further, the reliance on previous experience in assessing risks might not capture whole of program risks.

Expectedly, considerable research highlighted the importance of leadership & management. Safety climate was shown to none uniform in a company and may vary between different teams.

Training & competence was commonly put forward as a key safety measure, despite “the lack of motivation for education, partly because of a lack of adaptation to the individual and personal needs of the workers” (p5). The use of VR research was covered [although they didn’t discuss the validity or effect sizes of the VR research].

Nevertheless, it’s stated that “knowledge about safety is not enough and that other factors such as organization, group dynamics, culture and climate also play important roles when it comes to safety performance and awareness” (p5).

Safety in design research was briefly [& inadequately] covered. One problem regarding safety in design is that it tends to emphasise safety for the end-user and not during the construction phases. Researchers agreed that professionals involved in early planning & design phases “have to take a greater responsibility for health and safety on the construction sites” (p5).

For research on whether preventative safety work creates profitability, all found some sort of positive effect. For bonus schemes on avoiding accidents, several studies showed positive impacts in the short-term but the effects diminished [it also raises questions around underreporting].

For specific safety programs & initiatives, a range of programs have been evaluated. Importantly, a criticism of the programs is that they are not generally theory-based and give little assurance about the results. Further, lack of control groups make it difficult to determine the impact of the programs.

For current gaps in research, more qualitative research is needed compared to the dominance of quantitative-orientated research. Further, few studies have applied a gender perspective to construction safety & work.

Also more focus is needed on multi-employer worksites & inter-organisational complexity and how it impacts safety.

Another gap is research around small- to medium-sized companies and how they implement cost-effective interventions.

Finally, although the authors didn’t present this as a limitation – their point about construction safety research generally having accidents in the centre as the starting point and moving outwards I think is also a gap without thick descriptions about normal construction work.

Link to study: https://doi.org/10.3233/wor-192976

Link to the LinkedIn article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/research-bite-occupational-safety-construction-ben-hutchinson/