Forensic Engineers & Investigators
Construction site safety
Construction site safety is a specialised form of workplace health and safety. With over 40 years of site supervision and project management experience on large construction and building sites, our practitioners are experienced in construction work processes and have a pragmatic knowledge based approach to site safety. We know how to work within common industry constraints and expectations.
Capabilities and services:
Design of practical and live documents that lend themselves to improvement and development by frontline staff;
Construction purposed Job Safety Analysis (JSA) risk assessment systems;
Construction safety monitoring;
Provision of safety system documentation and checklists that are practical, minimalistic and cost effective documentation;
Examples of frontline industry work environments we serve are:
Building construction;
Farms, horticulture and rural contexts;
Manufacturing and machine trades;
How we do it
We begin each assignment by assessing the on-site needs of each context. We work with management, the workers and assess the implications of any recent incident history. We believe in stage wise implementation processes that are suitable for the situation concerned. Unless the client requires otherwise we work on a ‘get in and get out basis’ empowering management and frontline workers with the skills and techniques required.
Case study: Preparing a construction Health and Safety system for immigrant workers
A newly established construction company was struggling with the requirements of the Health and Safety Work Act 2015 (HSWA) and associated regulations, mainly because its workforce employed mostly workers for whom English was a second language.
We generated a brief Health and Safety Plan which contained an H&S Policy covering worker engagement, drug and alcohol policy, health checks and return to work procedures as well as a matrix of key tasks and responsibilities together with relevant excerpts from the HSWA Act and associated Regulations.
Only essential working documents were included in the H & S plan, based upon our knowledge of Worksafe’s requirements for this type of H & S system.
Staff and workers were gathered together to participate in a collaborative training session. It was delivered in two parts. The first explained workers how to identify hazards and complete the Risk Assessment Register; the second explained how to create a Task Analysis. Staff were also educated in how to conduct a Pre-Start/Toolbox briefing so that it could be relevant to the work being done on site and also to encourage worker engagement.
The Client was happy that the ‘paper work’ was so well organised and was easy to understand by people who did not always find it easy to understand formal documentation.
Our collective efforts were validated when Worksafe NZ, while conducting a routine random visit, complimented the client on their professional and effective Health and Safety systems and administration.