Construction Health and Safety
Health and Safety Consultancy Services for the Construction Industry
Construction work is often a dangerous game. In such a high-risk trade good construction health and safety is vital. As the owner of JHS Health and Safety Consultants, I certainly think so anyway. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) do their best to help us all to improve. They have done a lot to address the health of construction workers, and rightly so. JHS Health and Safety Consultants supports their aims. Employers must look out for their workers’ health and safety in construction work even if it’s not on their site. It is bound to be a business risk to them if they do not. Their decision may go sour. If it does their job costs can spiral out of control. The reason they might not manage their construction health and safety can be as simple as this. Bosses may not know what they need to do to improve, nor how.
This is where my firm JHS Health and Safety Consultants can help. By engaging my business services, you will get factual advice towards achieving your site goals. Help and advice will be always readily available. JHS Health and Safety Consultants has a service to help you work smart and to meet your legal needs too. Health and safety in construction work is what my business does best. I design my services with the tools needed to help small and medium size firms improve.
Reasons to Retain a Health and Safety Consultancy to Support your Business
It is good to see that there is ever growing national support for small firms, which is great news. This includes the availability of a lot of helpful information. However, it is still necessary that employers have access to help from a competent person. Using a good health and safety consultancy to fulfil this role has a lot of benefits: First-up, you can get a lot of help for your money. Then you can get competent advice for health and safety in construction work, pretty much as you need it. You will not need to look around if you need help in a hurry. It can be hard to find someone with the right knowhow, skills and experience. You have a chance to build up a good strong work relationship with less need to go over old ground.
There are plenty of reasons why a firm can benefit from the help of a competent health and safety service. Factors extend beyond health and safety. For one, it can look good in clients’ eyes. It shows that a firm is conscious about good health and safety at work. It will help to prove that a firm is competent and ready to carry out a good job. What’s more, it can help to attract work from better clients which leads toward making a good profit.
Why JHS Services Will Help With Your Construction Health and Safety Work
As I point out, it can be wise to retain the service of a good health and safety consultancy. Just be wary of the generic nature of some health and safety documents you might get. They can be too general. Some people may say risk in construction work is often that way. It can be it’s true, but it does not always follow that the means to control the risks are similar. Good employers must adopt risk controls to suit their tasks. This is often a simple case of making changes to suit the place of work. Without change, insurers or those who enforce the law may not see the risk controls as being suitable and sufficient. In other words, generic documents and action on site may not ‘cut the mustard’ in the eyes of the law. The bottom line is that employers still need to manage their work risks properly.
As owner of JHS Health and Safety Consultants, I attune health and safety policies to suit my clients’ needs. However, unless instructed my business will not produce documents at site level on a job-to-job basis – My clients will know their sites better than most people. Instead I have created web tools which are setup with a wide range of preset generic data options. It is down to clients to complete the documents as they like, but my business can advise and help them. The web tools easily allow clients to change or add to preset data, to make them site specific. They can make plans which are proportionate to the job’s risk. Risk controls need to mean something and work in real time situations. The whole point is to have a good effect on construction health and safety. I.E. to look out for people’s health and safety in construction work.
Overcome Major Hazards in Construction
There are many hazards in the industry, but some stand out. They include work at height, moving objects, slips, trips and falls, collapsing material, electricity and lifting work. Work vehicles pose a major hazard too and also come under health and safety in construction work. When in use they become a dangerous moving object. Year on year it seems that lots of workers die in an accident involving a road or site vehicle. Many more people will have a bad and life-changing injury. On that basis alone there is a case to properly manage vehicle use at work.
Slips, trips and fall on the same level are a major cause of injury. People say that in some conditions it is hard to avoid these types of event. This is true, environmental conditions do have an effect such as when handling site material. The problem is that it is to easy to blame what is obvious; like a worker who has an accident by failing to move a heavy board in the way they were told. It is not so easy to blame what you cannot see. Like bad task planning, where an employer did not establish a safe lifting plan or system of work; i.e. they did not avoid or reduce the job risks. These might include task design changes and making better use of work equipment. Other factors could be fixing guard rails for work at height, or isolating live electric wires. Sometimes it can be about having the right person to supervise the work to make sure it is done properly.
Health Hazards
Health is another area in the industry that still needs to improve. The three main culprits in construction work that affect workers’ health are noise, dust and vibration. Owing to these, many die or suffer ill health each year. Dust is the worst. But too much exposure to each is going to cause people harm. Work, such as cutting masonry or wood will create dust that can harm people; especially if done by power tools. It is usual for sites to amass lots of surface dust too, which is throw into the air each time it is disturbed. Dust can harbour all kinds of nasty toxins for people to breath in; a fine mix of hazardous material. Exposure to dust can cause ill health as it damages the lungs; ill health such as asthma, silicosis, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Some dusts are known to cause cancer too.
Just to mention it, we must not forget about the risk from asbestos too. People who inhale its fibres are at risk of long-term ill health and death. But we will dwell on that. The fact is that employers must do what the law needs to protect their workers’ health. But, if they just give out PPE alone this is not likely be enough to satisfy the law. As this must be a last line of defence; i.e. there should be other risk controls first. They may need to monitor their workers health too. But health surveillance laws can be complex. So in some types of work many employers fail to test their workers’ health as they may need to. But, you may be glad to hear that there are moves afoot to try and simplify occupational health. JHS Health and Safety Consultants will keep its clients up to date.
Mindset
There is a danger where those of us in the industry become to at ease with site risks. And unless we manage the work well, bad habits can set in; and then we pass these bad habits to others without thinking about it, and so on. What’s more it is too easy for us to accept risks from daily hazards as the ‘norm’; when really perhaps we should do more to improve our safety culture. Employers can be guilty of not doing what they perhaps need to to comply with laws; whilst, it seems that site workers too do not always report poor health and safety at work as they might. To be fair, health and safety in construction is a key part of a job; and treated in the same way as others factors a firm will need to manage.
Sometimes we need ‘a wake up call’ to make us see what we are doing wrong. It can take an event to happen that we did not want; such as a near miss. But even this may not be enough. It may take a bad accident to happen, which results in a big loss before we look to change. If this happens, it is not the end of the world. It may be hard to get effective health and safety in construction work back on track; but it will happen with the right help and support.
Planning your Construction Health and Safety Work
As a high risk trade, it is right to plan health and safety in construction work. Such as plans to lift, and to work at height. And vehicle work will need good planning too. Health and safety in construction needs a plan that will work. So, a contractor may need to keep an up to date construction phase health and safety plan during their work. This is due to the CDM Regulations 2015. This duty, more often than not, is down to the principal contractor. But it can be where the client appoints a single site contractor too; as they will then need to make the plan. Each way, the right health and safety in construction is going to help.
JHS Health and Safety Consultants will help you plan your work to comply with the law. Because it will help you with policy that says how you will manage your health and safety in construction work. It also has the means to help you to identify and control your work risks. Such as a tool to create and store your risk assessments. And, what is more, our forms and documents have lots of good information for you to use. If you want to join JHS but want to know more, you’re welcome to get in touch. There are lots of ways JHS can help you with your health and safety in construction. A consultant will be glad to answer any query.
Trends for Health and Safety in Construction Work
Britain leads the way for building and construction health and safety. In fact the standards set in the UK often inspire others worldwide. And yet some employers still have a reason not engage with health and safety as they might like to. (You can see more about this on the JHS page, ‘Health and Safety at Work’). But the trend is for accident and ill health statistics to improve year on year. However, there is still scope for us to continue to improve. We must all try to embrace new ideas too; as we all have a part to play in the future of safe and healthy places of work. And health and safety advice will urge employers to own health and safety at work. So if they do, and engage their workers too, then they are likely to profit; and have safe and healthy sites.
It is the job of JHS Health and Safety Consultants to keep clients in touch with change. This can be detail they need to manage new laws as they should. Or, to prompt them to inform their workers about change that may affect their health and safety at work; and to engage them in health and safety decisions too. And if you invest and trust in JHS, then it expects to repay you with the support services you deserve. This is why take time to harvest the information out there, for you; and to develop tools to save you time; and to help you transpose text for practical use at the point of work. If you would like to know more about us, then please contact JHS.
