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28th January 2021
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Tackling the most common but preventable health & safety issues on house-building sites
Every year several thousand construction workers are injured whilst working on building sites. According to the Health & Safety Executive, during 2016/17 around 1,200 of these injuries were due to slips, trips or falls.
Effective management of working areas and access routes could prevent some of these injuries. With an estimated 2.3 million working days lost each year in construction between 2014/15 and 2016/17 due to workplace injury (17%) and work-related illness (83%)*, NHBC, the leading provider of health & safety services to the home-building industry and the organiser of the UK's only industry health & safety awards scheme, highlights the most frequent reported items in the final quarter of 2017:
* Workers working on scaffold with no guardrails in place
* No fall protection on open stairwells
* Access routes blocked with site materials
* No eye protection being worn when using a paslode nail gun
* No respiratory protection being worn when using a disc cutter or saw
* No pedestrian/traffic segregation in place, with operatives and members of the public walking in the road with the site traffic
* Scaffold not being erected correctly in accordance with TG 20.13
NHBC health & safety advisers can provide coaching and advice to site managers, and when the right measures are in place, the safety of a site can be dramtically improved.
"Over recent years, we have seen big improvements with regard to safety on site and the number of injuries to construction workers has reduced," notes Stephen Ashworth, health & safety services manager. "Here at NHBC we've seen the importance given to health & safety on house-building sites across the UK, with record levels of entries for the NHBC Health and Safety Awards and higher levels of take up for our health and safety services.
"One way to avoid injuries on house-building sites it to make sure a safe work environment is provided and taking a proactive approach to safety on site helps keep workers safe."
NHBC will be announcing the commended winners for the Health & Safety Awards 2018 on 23rd May.
Further advice for construction workers can be found at:
16th March 2018