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Olympic Delivery Authority - target accident rate
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Posted By Pugwash
I see that the Olympic Delivery Authority has set a target of no more than one reportable accident for every million person hours worked during the construction of the Olympic Park infrastructure. I calculate that is equivalent to about 200 reportable accidents per 100,000 employees per year.
The HSE's RIDDOR rate for construction is about 950 reported accidents per 100,000 employees per year and the Labour Force Survey rate for reportable accidents in construction is about 1,700 accidents per 100,000 employees per year. The Olympic Delivery Authority appear to have set a pretty ambitious target. Is it achievable? It would be great if it was. Does anyone know what the actual reportable accident rate was/is for Terminal 5 at Heathrow.
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Posted By Crim
Please forgive me for sounding unreasonable, but how about a ZERO accident rate throughout the whole project?
Could bonuses or other rewards be offered for good H & S?
Surely this is not impossible if everyone were to keep the eye firmly "on the ball".
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Posted By Stupendous Man
Crim,
I'm sure that others will pick up on this, but giving a target of a zero accident rate will only lead to under-reporting and other dubious practices to avoid accidents becoming general knowledge.
Should there be a target accident rate at all?
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Posted By Ian G Hutchings
Hi
I just hope that this doesn't end up with a purely reactive focus on AFR. It is not a great idea to just focus on AFR (as we all know).
Hopefully the project will focus more on what people do to prevent accidents.
I think the target is actually too high. If I had a company with 25,000 people, would it be OK to hospitalise and potentially kill 50 of them a year, I don't think so.
There should (in my opinion) be no obvious target apart from a goal of no incidents or injuries. The weight of measurement and review should be on robust safety management by all parties to prevent injuries.
As soon as the ODA, or any other major client, start focusing on AFR alone guess what happens? People start to lose sight of how H&S is being managed and get all flustered about RIDDORS. You could have loads of 1 day lost time accidents, but these would not get the same focus.
Why don't they use a 1 day lost time rate rather than the legally based 3 days?
Ian
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Posted By Robert K Lewis
Stup man
Totally agree that Zero cannot be a target. We will shortly re-tread the Target v Expectation debate and this is one which I have trod too often to repeat it.
Having said that I think that the target is actually probably not that stretching, with a bit of fair wind it could well be achieved. I in fact achieved half their stated target over 7 years ago so from that perspective it should be around 1 reportable per 2 or 3 million worked hours.
Bob
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Posted By garyh
Surely the GOAL is zero accidents and the target is xxxx.
If you have a target of zero and have an accident, what do you do then?
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Posted By Lawrence Waterman This is a very welcome discussion. To get this into perspective: * we want to reduce accidents and ill health on the London 2012 construction programme to as low as we can achieve * an aim of "1 in a million" is a sensible target en route * it's not about "hospitalisation and deaths", the measured rates are RIDDOR reportable, so it covers sprains that keep people off work for more than 3 days, and an AFR of 0.1 is very challenging * we are not looking at AFR in isolation - we measure performance on every project by every lead designer, main contractor and CDM Coordinator using a balanced scorecard, including efforts on behaviour, processes, procedures, etc. etc. Please follow up your interest by downloading the Olympic Delivery Authority's Design & Construction Health and Safety Standard at http://www.london2012.or.../ODA/Healthandsafety.htm and also get your organisation to sign up to the 2012 Construction Commitments, valid for every organisation that commissions building or FM work, designs or builds. IOSH supported the London 2012 bid, it's great that the Institution is continuing to take an active interest and is supporting a healthy and safe programme of works.
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Posted By Pugwash
Lawrence, The Health and Safety Standard makes for interesting reading. Some ambitious targets, but why not.
Do you know what sorts of RIDDOR reportable accident rates have been achieved on recent major construction projects such as Terminal 5, with which I think you had some involvement?
P
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Posted By Robert K Lewis
Lawrence
The one issue I have sometimes with pinning an aspect of performance to achieving a particular AFR is the issue of demoralisation if something happens early in the project and the "target " is shot before the work really gets going. I can think of some extremely well managed jobs where there were still fatalities - what is one to say to a management team when they have strived so hard.
I haven't had a real opportunity to go through your documents but for me the real measures of safety performance rely more on the proactive management activities and their responsiveness to problems raised by the workforce. These are however very difficult to achieve. Answers on the back of a large detailed designers drawing, aka Post-it, would not provide all the solutions necessary though.
Bob
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Posted By Crim
Lawrence,
I just looked at the document - 81 pages - I don't want to read it all as it is not relevant to me but I would ask is it possible to categorise your groups of employees/construction workers and highlight those at higher risk, in an effort to target those groups for more frequent safety training (tool box talks etc.) and supervision.
Then you could separate the lower risk workers and possibly adjust the expected accident rate to a lower acceptable number, if you know what I mean?
The bottom line is that you are making a statement accepting that accidents will happen and if you keep the number down to YOUR acceptable number then you are doing well. In my humble opinion you should be stating that accidents are not acceptable and that all accidents will be reported and investigated fully and anyone deemed to be at fault will be dealt with accordingly!
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Posted By Ian G Hutchings
Thanks Lawrence
It is good to hear so quickly that the focus is not just on lagging performance.
I think that this thread has highlighted what could happen if the expectations are not very clearly explained and interpreted.
The document does detail the expectations and clear standards for good H&S performance. I have found a few times recently that suppliers have been unclear about what a client actually expects when they talk about behaviour and leadership on projects.
Maybe the ODA could consider a few simple but effective guides on these expectations with some really good examples.
Cheers
Ian
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