Analysis of the impact of health and safety coordinator on construction site accidents: The case of Spain

An Institutional System Proposal for Advanced Occupational Safety and Labor Standards in the Turkish Construction Industry

The Turkish construction industry is problematic with its inferior occupational safety practices and labor standards. This paper explores the current institutional system's problems and designs a national institutional system to improve labor conditions in the Turkish construction industry. The study applies cause-and-effect analysis, stakeholder analysis, and information flow analysis based on the thematic literature and regulation reviews and the data collected from expert interviews. Findings revealed that the industry represents a drastically problematic context with high rates of occupational accidents, job insecurity, and excessive working time, and the inspection and enforcement system is still immature, calling for additional institutional arrangements to establish a collaborative and sustainable environment. There is a need for a holistic, multi-dimensional, and systematic perspective to develop coordination and inspection mechanisms in the sector. The paper proposes an institution and scorecard design by applying a quality function deployment framework matching needs and systemic functions that can overcome the existing deficiency in labor conditions. The paper contributes to filling the gap in the literature on the multi-dimensional, systematic institutional perspective to develop coordination and inspection mechanisms in the construction industry and proposes an institutional system example that could be adapted to other national contexts.

UAV Application for Typhoon Damage Assessment in Construction Sites

The safety inspection capability of construction sites before typhoons could be improved using a UAV, which has a rapid identification capability. However, the main safety inspection items need construction experience and technical safety specifications. This study aimed to obtain the influencing factors of typhoon and their weight proportion through the knowledge of disaster theory and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). The effectiveness of this method was verified by collecting and analyzing the field data at the construction site. A set of construction site early warning flows and disaster prevention and mitigation measures for typhoons are proposed. The results show that UAVs can be used as a tool in this scenario, helping to improve disaster prevention and enhancing the capability of construction site management to evaluate typhoon risk. The research provides a much-needed common ground for collecting and analyzing advances in UAVs and immersive technologies, as well as their influence on building projects. Furthermore, this article provides a new horizon for beginner researchers working on digitalized construction research.

Exploring the Formation Mechanism of Unsafe Construction Behavior and Testing Efficient Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) Programs

Safety education and training for employees is important to ensure the safety of construction and improve the safety awareness of employees. It is difficult to meet the needs of the new situation of safety production with traditional safety education and training consequences of construction enterprises. To address this deficiency, this research analyzed the formation mechanism of safety behavior of personnel at different levels in construction enterprises from the perspective of behaviorist psychology and studied their different needs for safety training, designing training programs for simple safety behavior and complex safety behavior according to the degree of difficulty of the training content. This research also developed and tested models of training frequency and training times and carried out corresponding experimental research. Through the experiments of “safety behavior by wearing a helmet” and “fire control consciousness training”, it was found that the training of consciousness of relatively complex safety behavior should follow the principles that each training should last longer and the training interval should not be too short, so as to minimize the cost of safety education and training while ensuring the quality of safety education and training.

Development of the Level of Preventive Action Method by Observation of the Characteristic Value for the Assessment of Occupational Risks on Construction Sites

The special circumstances of the high accident rate in the construction industry compared to other sectors are significant and represent a major concern for many countries. Construction work involves a large number of risks that cause or may cause accidents with serious consequences for the worker’s health, even death. The Level of Preventive Action is a novel methodology of occupational risk assessment adapted to building works. It is based on the development of the mathematical formulation of William T. Fine’s method. Its implementation covers four of the techniques for combating risk: Safety at Work, Industrial Hygiene, Ergonomics and Psychosociology. It evaluates, quantitatively, the amount of preventive action required based on the characteristic complexity of the work units, their location and their interdependence. The method protocol defines a new observation parameter called Characteristic Value which is inherent to the real situation of the construction process. The aim of this study is to develop the characterisation of the Characteristic Value in the Level of Preventive Action method. It also justifies the procedure to obtain this Characteristic Value and how its implementation and result should be interpreted. Finally, the methodology is applied on a real case.

Zero-Risk Interpretation in the Level of Preventive Action Method Implementation for Health and Safety in Construction Sites

Risk assessment is a legal obligation for all companies in most countries worldwide. It aims to control the quality of working conditions and avoid externalizing the consequences of accidents and resulting costs to society. This work discusses the need for an adequate interpretation of the zero-risk concept from a technical-preventive perspective to assess occupational risks in construction sites. A critical analysis of several risk assessment methodologies was carried out, focusing on the evaluation criteria of little or no-risk situations. The verification of the results was made through a case study. The perception of health and safety risks by workers is very different from that of the evaluators. Often, when workers identify a situation as low-risk or even zero-risk, the evaluator assesses the same context as maximum risk. Given the workers' and the evaluators' responses, the Preventive Action Method establishes a new parameter, the Environment Congruence. This parameter is based on the perception of the preventive environment and gives more importance to the evaluators' decision. When preventive action is optimal, the risk is low in all preventive observation settings. In conclusion, this study justifies the non-nullity of the risk and the difficulty of assessing zero-risk in construction sites. Therefore, evaluations with qualitative and quantitative non-risk approaches should be discarded.