榴莲视屏

Eeee! Back in the day, when I were a lad, us in the bulding game were dead 鈥榓rd! Thought nothing of a visit to the hospital to get stitched up!

Bit of a bummer, though, if we were gashed open somewhere that stopped us getting straight back to work!聽Meant no money coming in for a week or two!

Safety gloves got invented. Trouble with them in the early days was that they interfered too much with manual dexterity. They鈥檝e got a lot better.

Hard hats? Caught my head on a bit of scaffold I couldn鈥檛 see because of one. Knocked my specs and cut my nose! Another time actually knocked my specs right off and cost me 拢350 for new lens. That time, though, suppose I have to admit the hard hat stopped me being brained by the falling timber!

Then, it must have been in the 1980鈥檚, Health And Safety Plans got introduced.

All they were was another heap of paper to be stuck somewhere in the site office and ignored.

The last one just got photocopied for the next job. Somewhere between the 80鈥檚 and now, though, things have moved on.聽PPE () is now great stuff! So good, in fact, that I sometimes see it worn as life-style clothing!

Read also: Why we love quality in a construction project

People, myself amongst them, started having to think about the specific risks involved in a project and come up with ways of dealing with them that kept everyone, site visitors as well as site personnel, safe and well.

Yes, we even consider the potential longer-term health threat!

All this has pushed up build costs, though. I had recent personal experience of this! To renew the flashing around our chimney stack cost 拢120. The scaffolding cost another 拢480! We just used to use ladders to get up there! I even boast I鈥檝e slipped a couple of times and been stuck on the roof, frozen with the fear of going over the edge.

Like I said; dead 鈥榓rd, me!

However, we do seem to have made progress, some of that courtesy of PPE, because not nearly as many building workers are queuing up at the A&E Departments these days!

But the biggest progress we have made is one that has come about with the change of culture and the attitude we now have to risk in construction.

鈥淏ack in the day鈥� construction was rated as a 鈥淗igh Risk鈥� occupation along with deep-sea fishing and mining.

In the 1980鈥檚 we experienced 10,000 deaths a year on our sites. Happily none of those have ever been on a site I was either working on or in charge of! These days we are down to 150 deaths a year in construction!

That must surely make any additional incurred costs well worth while! That鈥檚 why I love Construction Phase Health and Safety Plans – And you should, too! They are there for everyone to read and everyone should!

They also have the main site- specific risks hammered into heads during Site Inductions – even for Visitors!