How does the book, Integrating Work Health and Safety into Construction Project Management, address this?
The book compiled work undertaken over a 12-year period, addressing work health and safety challenges and identifying improvement strategies that are applicable across the entire life cycle of a construction project.
The research focused on the contribution required of all key construction industry stakeholders, including clients, design professionals, construction contractors, industry employers and unions, and other participants in the broader supply chain.
The over-arching message is that work health and safety considerations need to be better integrated into construction project management practices across all stages and by engaging with all stakeholders.
What is the 'active client' model outlined in the research?
The active client model was built on a framework developed at RMIT for the Office of the Federal Safety Commissioner in 2007 and has been adapted by the Victorian Government’s MTIA in the delivery of their large program of projects.
The model acknowledges the important role that clients can play in setting work health and safety performance expectations, selecting contractors with appropriate health and safety capability and working with them to ensure that work health and safety are well managed across the program of work.
In particular, the model enables the sharing of lessons between contractors working on different parts of the transport infrastructure construction program.
This is a departure from traditional client behaviour, in which workers’ health and safety was treated exclusively as a matter for contractors, with little involvement or input from the client.
What can other major infrastructure projects learn from the examples in the book?
The book contains important lessons for clients, design professionals, construction organization, project managers and others about how to embed work health and safety in management activities across the entire life cycle.
It also incorporates a detailed analysis of the factors impacting ‘safety in design’ processes in the construction industry and provides recommendations for how best to eliminate or reduce work health and safety risks at the design stage of construction projects.
There is also a tool that can be used by construction organisations to understand the extent to which their culture is likely to enable or impede work health and safety performance.
Story: Grace Taylor
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