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November 29, 2016

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Workers to down tools to promote health, safety and wellbeing

Infrastructure companies across the UK will be downing tools in April next year in a bid to boost health, safety and wellbeing standards.

Stop. Make a Change is a campaign organised by the Civil Engineering Contractors Association which encourages leading contractors and clients to stand down work on the morning of 18 April 2017.

Companies involved will use the time to talk to employees and suppliers about how the construction and infrastructure industry can boost performance in relation to health, safety and wellbeing.

Organisations backing the campaign include BAM Nuttall, Balfour Beatty, Crossrail, HS2 Ltd, Heathrow Airport, Environment Agency and Network Rail, among many others.

Each company taking part will make a commitment to the four main campaign areas:

  • promoting positive mental health
  • tackling lung disease
  • stopping fatigue; and
  • boosting plant safety.

The aim of these commitments is to make sites safer, support better health and promote wellbeing in the infrastructure and construction areas.

CECA chief executive Alasdair Reisner said: “As an industry we have made tremendous progress in recent years to improve our health, safety and wellbeing. However there remains significant scope to improve.

“We think Stop. Make a Change will provide a platform for the sector to work together, tackling some of the leading issues faced by our workforce and supply chain”

Ruth Gallagher, safety improvement director at Heathrow Airport, said: “Our vision is that everyone gets home safe and well every day, a key success factor is making health, safety and wellbeing personal for everyone so they make the right choices, openly report and make interventions to keep themselves and everyone around them safe and well.

“Taking part in the National Stop Make a Change campaign provides another opportunity for teams across Heathrow to talk about health and wellbeing in a positive and engaging way.”

Nick Fletcher, Morgan Sindall’s managing director of infrastructure said: “We are committed to ensuring that our strategy for health, safety and wellbeing provides continuous improvements for all our employees and other stakeholders – we do this by measuring both the inputs and the outputs of our strategy.

“It is important to keep things fresh, and using inputs like Stop. Make a Change are invaluable opportunities for us to reflect on our performance and review how we can continue to develop and advance – not just at Morgan Sindall, but across the industry as a whole.”

What makes us susceptible to burnout?

In this episode  of the Safety & Health Podcast, ‘Burnout, stress and being human’, Heather Beach is joined by Stacy Thomson to discuss burnout, perfectionism and how to deal with burnout as an individual, as management and as an organisation.

We provide an insight on how to tackle burnout and why mental health is such a taboo subject, particularly in the workplace.

stress

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Nigel Dupree
Nigel Dupree
7 years ago

STOPPING FATIGUE ! Now that is a “known or should have been known” foreseeable even, ‘predictable hazard’ that has always increased the risk of unintentional errors, mishaps and sometime catastrophic accidents. Whether just popping a couple of sugars in someones coffee who doesn’t take sugar at one extreme to the other extreme that may account for Brazilian football teams plane early landing, somewhere in the chain of causation leading too this event, ground crew, air-traffic control, Pilot etc there is likely to be a simple error of judgment in calculation and/or poor decision along the way. Fatigue is yet to… Read more »