Health & safety: Is it time for a change?
AS contractors we’ve all sat through many health & safety site inductions before the main contractor allows us to start work, but just how much safer are we when we leave the room compared to when we went in?
Don’t get me wrong, health & safety is the number one priority, but having recently sat through a five-hour induction just to get on to an airport site, followed by a further two-hour induction before we could start the actual retail job inside the airport, it struck me that the potential for us to become numb to its message far
outweighed any value we might gain.
The trouble with health & safety is that all too often it’s seen as inconvenient, time consuming and often costly, even though we all acknowledge its importance in a modern construction workplace.
Take the cost issue; another site induction we recently attended, took place on a Monday at 8am, 200miles away, yet we were not due to commence work on site until the Thursday.
Apart from the down time and consequential costs to us, are circumstances like this conducive to taking on board any of the health & safety information? OK, so time and cost-wise most of us will factor this into the overall job – increasing the cost of the job – but in this economic climate with tight budgets, this doesn’t really make much sense to me.
Then there’s the induction itself; a lot of the information will be exactly the same –maybe a different format that will have been presented at every other induction – but with a little bit of extra site or project-specific stuff
thrown in.
Surely there is a danger that this important site-specific information will be lost in the repeated information?
Most of us are or should be aware of the fundamentals of health & safety gained from experience, commonsense and specifically, our Construction Skills Certification Scheme (CSCS), so surely this element is something which could just be tested on a yearly or half-yearly basis?
This would make the induction the preserve of the site-specific safety information only, which is probably of more value to the contractor, and would take the form of amuch shorter, (more welcomed!) and more readily
assimilated brief.
Financially, the money spent on the lengthy inductionmay well be better spent on policing site health & safety and targeting those individuals (very, very small in number) who seemto have a total disregard for their own or anybody else’s safety on site.
I can understand why lengthy inductions are the standard as it absolves the main contractor from certain liabilities having made us aware of the dangers and what the site safety rules are.
You might even have to sign something or be given another sticker for your safety helmet saying you have been inducted, but let’s face it, unless we are all tested on the content of the induction to prove the information has gone in, isn’t this a pointless exercise? Is the safety induction exercise just there to simply cover themain contractor’s ‘bum’ for insurance?
Whilst again affirmingmy belief in its importance, is there a better, more flexible method of making us all safer and reducing risks on site? Health & safety is paramount, and we all want to be safe, but I believe it is time the whole process was evaluated – but I guess the tricky part is how?
I do think commonsense has to play a part though and maybe schemes such as CSCS could be beefed up with a structured and regular testing of core health & safety principles?
I must confess that I don’t have an answer really, but I do know that what we have at present isn’t ideal. I’d welcome your thoughts on this and especially your suggestions for change.
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