Incentivising safety
HSE experts talk to Big Project ME about what’s happening in the industry
In terms of insurance pay outs for the more frequent incidents, would you say they are large enough to incentivise more stringent onsite regulations?
SR: Definitely. These incidences are quite high and there are claims made on a daily basis starting from minor bruising to fatal accidents, and more could be done to minimise these risks.
A lot of these things don’t cost money to implement but must be thought of from a human perspective, not financial; we are not talking about machines. There is a strong emotional issue attached to this too.
But one of the things happening here is that we don’t have data. We need to know what types of losses are happening and then establish dialogue with industry experts to report what is being seen. Then we all need to see if we can sit together and find a way to improve the situation.
MK: The publication of statistics would be beneficial to everybody. We have data on every accident from what happened to who it happened to and which part of the body is injured, but we don’t have that from outside the organisation. It would be useful to know what is prevalent in Saudi Arabia for example. What we do within HLG is log all incidents from every site on a Trade Accident Matrix and all our projects are on there to give a bigger picture which goes up to the corporate level, but only within HLG.
We know our biggest risk is working at height, but what we don’t have is data from companies in Qatar that allows us to identify that for example there is a prevalence of accidents in excavations. With this, we could then ask why. Is it the ground; the availability of equipment to make it stable; or is it just one of those strange anomalies for this year? But as the contractor it gives us focus to tackle a known risk.
KF: Companies that commit to Health and Safety will ultimately have fewer incidents and thus claims will be less for these companies, for this reason discounts offered by the Insurance Companies for the premiums is a good incentive.
SR: There is also internal pressure and the process of sharing data may reduce a company’s chance of winning a project. The possibilities of not finishing a project in time due to high accident rates can future projects.
MK: It’s almost a certainly that if you have a major incident onsite you will not finish your project on time and it’s not always realised that the impact goes far beyond the poor person who isn’t going to go back to their family. The emotional impact on other workers, directors, timescales, the investigators that visit; even for the accidents where there is no loss of life and no physical injury, I have known sites that have virtually stopped work for three months and at the end of that time if the schedule isn’t met you’re into liquidated debt.
