Construction Work Health and Safety Tips

Keeping workers and visitors protected on a construction site is the duty of the person who is in charge of the site. Neglecting to apply effective safety measures can put anybody on or near the site in danger.

In NSW, around 25,000 workers were harmed on construction sites because of unsafe work methods in the past three years only. According to a post on wsws.org, 700 construction sites in New South Wales are being ignored or undermined the safety requirements by building companies to cut costs and finish projects as soon as possible, discovered by the state government agency WorkSafe NSW.

If you're a construction project administrator or site administrator, it's up to you to consider the right measures and safeguard your workplace from unwanted hazards. Below are a few essential health and safety tips you should think about to improve construction site safety practices.

Knowledge
Before any worker - regardless of his or her position or level of experience - can enter on a construction site, he or she needs to be completely knowledgeable about the potential hazards. Uninformed workers are probably the biggest risks in any industry, as their unknowing mistakes put other people in danger. Knowledge of dangers available and keeping a continuous condition of awareness is probably the number-one best way to reduce injuries.

Training
All workers need to have an ongoing white card before they start work on-site. Site-specific induction training also needs to be done by each worker, to indicate any dangerous areas and provide guidance for emergency management.

Communication
Construction firms would be wise to provide workers with devices, such as smartphones, walkie talkies, or headsets, which enable quick and effective communication between team members. Without the right communication among every person around the construction site, workers won’t understand what to assume. Distinct and relevant communication with everybody not just makes the project pass quicker but also helps keep every person knowledgeable.

Site safety
Restricted site entry should not just be set up to simply safeguard equipment from harm or theft. The reassurance of and outside of work hours is essential to protect people on the streets from possible construction risks. Including supervision of authorized site visitors.

Appropriate Equipment
To make a culture focused on construction site safety must provide workers the appropriate equipment and sufficient workspace for the job available. Without the appropriate equipment, you can’t get construction site safety since there will always be a chance to get injured utilizing the incorrect equipment.

Guidance
Preferably, construction workers would completely understand the effects of limited safety measures and thus act in a manner to make sure site-wide well-being - however, this is not an ideal world. Every site should have a solid supervisor who is ready and able to applying safety standards without any conditions.

Safe work method assessment
A safe work method statement (SWMS) should be ready for all dangerous construction projects before work starts. The SWMS should describe the scope of work needed, any possible safety issues, and how hazards will be avoided and handled. Legally, construction work must not start until SWMS requirements are fulfilled.

Conclusion
The one thing that each construction worker must keep in mind is that injuries occur and all things that they perform when they are at work can be possibly dangerous in one way or some other. Therefore, they must be careful every minute of waking time, to leave and return home the way that they arrived.

View more: Why Safe Work Method Statement Is Important?

Ways to Completing a Successful Job Safety Analysis

Successful risk management begins with figuring out and dealing with risks before accidents happen. While most safety experts know that a complete job safety analysis (JSA) is a reliable method for analyzing workplace hazards, the difficulties of taking them out often derail businesses from finishing them. Additionally, even when JSAs have been completed, too often the first assessments are not revisited or updated as required to be successful.

Without a strong knowledge of the hazards and risks your workers deal with the jobs they attain every day, it’s difficult to keep them secure. Essentially that carrying out JSAs for every job or process, updating them regularly and providing workers with quick access to their findings is important to creating better knowing of safety risks.

Let’s evaluate the vital ways of completing a successful JSA.

Pick the Jobs being Analyze
A JSA can carry out for those jobs on a worksite if the job is scheduled or no schedule. Even jobs that just carry out a single activity needs to be reviewed by analyzing nearby work situations.

Usually, JSAs for jobs with the maximum regularity and seriousness of accidents, or people with the top possibility of incidents, should be performed first. Analyses of new jobs and jobs where modifications have been made in processes and procedures need to follow. Finally, JSA's for those jobs should be carried out and created accessible for workers to review.

Divide the Job into a Described Series
To carry out an in-depth and appropriate JSA, every job must be divided into a described series of individual tasks. It’s essential to avoid identifying individual job tasks very narrowly or very broadly. Generally, a job should include a maximum of ten-person tasks. If your JSA exceeds this figure, consider splitting the job into two or more different phases. It also is important to maintain a suitable series of job tasks to ensure that through the hazard identification stage, hazards are dealt with in the order they come across by workers.

Job task outline generally is done through direct viewing, with a minimum of one EHS specialist or direct supervisor know about the job and creating the series of individual tasks as they are done by a skilled worker. Viewing of a skilled worker helps ensure that job tasks are carried out in the correct series with a high level of safety measure, helping to determine unexpected hazards more easily. This also helps make sure that every task, even usually skipped steps such as set-up and clean-up, is being analyzed too. Remember, if a task isn’t discovered, risks can’t be discovered possibly.

When the observation is finished, participants should meet to analyze the results and ensure that all steps properly were identified.

Find out the Possible Hazards of Each Task
Hazards should be discovered right after the observation and job task outline while the series and possible hazards are still new in participants’ thoughts. Several questions need to be asked to assess the possible hazards in carrying out individual job tasks, like:

• Does the equipment employed produce any possible hazards?
• Is there possible for slips, trips or falls?
• Is there a possibility of exposure to toxic/hazardous materials or electric hazards?

Produce Safety measures to lessen or Remove Hazards
The structure of controls is a well-known and commonly-used application for developing safety measures for hazards related to job tasks. There are four popular methods used in developing safety measures for hazards related to job tasks.

• Reduction - Physically eliminate the hazard
• Replacement - Switch the hazard
• Executive controls - Identify individuals from the hazard
• Management controls - Alter the way people work

Developing a More powerful Safety Culture
After a Job Safety Analysis (JSA) has been finished, the results must be distributed around workers so they understand the hazards linked to the jobs they will be carrying out, and understand what safety measures will help them finish their jobs safely. Employers also need to archive and reference these details to conform with hazard review and elimination need and protect themselves from legal responsibility in the case of civil or criminal cases.