Taking care of safety

Safety is a huge responsibility on a construction site and is often undervalued because the benefit of a great system is that nothing happens. If you can make health and safety look easy you are very good at your job. The challenge in this role is that very few people assign the same level of importance or priority to safety unless they have been involved in a serious incident themselves. The harsh reality of work health and safety is that it costs a lot to maintain a compliant site and that no amount of money that an incident / accident victim might get in a compensation claim will ever replace that faculty or functionality that was damaged in the accident.

Safety on a construction site starts with the identification of hazards and calculation of risk. This process is called Risk Management and is done through the use of a Risk Assessment.

The reason you identify potential hazards on a job site is so that you can then determine how dangerous the activity actually is. Once you understand how dangerous the demolition job is, or the threat that activity poses to the workers, public and environment you can put effective controls in place to mitigate that risk. If you don’t perform a risk assessment, you have no idea as to the level of risk and thus can’t implement an effective risk management strategy. In addition, it is a legal requirement that you utilise risk management strategies to minimise the risk posed by the activities that you, as the contractor, create through the scope of your work (Commonwealth of Australia).

A regulation is legislation made by the Minister to deal with matters of an administrative nature; or prohibit exposure to risk; or prescribe ways to prevent or minimise exposure to risk. Where a regulation defines the way to do the work it must be followed.