Applying Resilience Engineering to improve Safety Management in a Construction Site: Design and Validation of a Questionnaire

Authors: M. C. Pardo-Ferreira, J. C. Rubio-Romero, M. Martínez-Rojas

Abstract:

Resilience Engineering is a new paradigm of safety management that proposes to change the way of managing the safety to focus on the things that go well instead of the things that go wrong. Many complex and high-risk sectors such as air traffic control, health care, nuclear power plants, railways or emergencies, have applied this new vision of safety and have obtained very positive results. In the construction sector, safety management continues to be a problem as indicated by the statistics of occupational injuries worldwide. Therefore, it is important to improve safety management in this sector. For this reason, it is proposed to apply Resilience Engineering to the construction sector. The Construction Phase Health and Safety Plan emerges as a key element for the planning of safety management. One of the key tools of Resilience Engineering is the Resilience Assessment Grid that allows measuring the four essential abilities (respond, monitor, learn and anticipate) for resilient performance. The purpose of this paper is to develop a questionnaire based on the Resilience Assessment Grid, specifically on the ability to learn, to assess whether a Construction Phase Health and Safety Plans helps companies in a construction site to implement this ability. The research process was divided into four stages: (i) initial design of a questionnaire, (ii) validation of the content of the questionnaire, (iii) redesign of the questionnaire and (iii) application of the Delphi method. The questionnaire obtained could be used as a tool to help construction companies to evolve from Safety-I to Safety-II. In this way, companies could begin to develop the ability to learn, which will serve as a basis for the development of the other abilities necessary for resilient performance. The following steps in this research are intended to develop other questions that allow evaluating the rest of abilities for resilient performance such as monitoring, learning and anticipating.

Keywords: Resilience engineering, construction sector, resilience assessment grid, construction phase health and safety plan.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI): doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1474691

References:

[1] E. Hollnagel, "Is safety a subject for science?" Safety Science, 67, pp. 547–588, Aug. 2014.
[2] E. Hollnagel. "Is justice really important for safety?" Hindsight, 18, pp.10-13. Dec. 2014.
[3] E. Hollnagel, D. D. Woods and N. Leveson Resilience engineering: Concepts and precepts. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.; 2007.
[4] A. Rankin. “Making Sense of Adaptations: Resilience in High-Risk Work”. Diss. Linköping University Electronic Press, Jan. 2017.
[5] E. Hollnagel, “Prologue: the scope of resilience engineering”. “Resilience engineering in practice: A guidebook”. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.; Nov. 2013.
[6] E. Hollnagel, “Safety-II in practice: developing the resilience potentials” Routledge, 2017.
[7] OSHA, “Worker Safety Series - Construction | Occupational Safety and Health Administration” (online) Available at: https://www.osha.gov/Publications/OSHA3252/3252.html (Accessed 10 Jul. 2018).
[8] EUROSTAT, “Accidents at work statistics - Statistics Explained” (online) Available at: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Accidents_at_work_statistics (Accessed 10 Jul. 2018).
[9] Instituto Nacional de Seguridad e Higiene en el Trabajo, “Informe anual de accidentes de trabajo en España 2015”. Madrid. NIPO (en línea): 272-15-081-4. 2016.
[10] A. Griffith, and T. Howarth, “Construction health and safety management” Routledge, Sep. 2014.
[11] M. Gervais, “Good management practice as a means of preventing back disorders in the construction sector” Safety science, 41(1), pp. 77-88, Feb. 2003.
[12] M. A. Camino Lopez, D. O. Ritzel, I. Fontaneda and O. J. González Alcantara, "Construction industry accidents in Spain." Journal of safety research 39, no.5, pp. 497-507, Jan. 2008.
[13] G. Hunte and J. Marsen, “Engineering resilience in an urban emergency department, Part 2”. Fifth Resilient Health Care Meeting, Aug. 2016.
[14] E. Rigaud, C. Neveu, S. Duvenci-Langa, M. N. Obrist and S. Rigaud, "Proposition of an organisational resilience assessment framework dedicated to railway traffic management." In N. Dasdashi et al. (Eds.), Rail Human Factors: Supporting reliability, safety and cost reduction. pp. 727-732. Taylor and Francis. 2013
[15] D. Ljungberg, and V. Lundh. "Resilience Engineering within ATM-Development, adaption, and application of the Resilience Analysis Grid (RAG)" (LiU-ITN-TEK-G--013/080--SE), 2013.
[16] Australian Radiation Protection Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA). “Regulatory Guide. Holistic Safety - Sample Questions” (REG-COM-SUP-240V v1.1), 2017.
[17] J. Y. Corral. “Validez y confiabilidad de los instrumentos de investigación para la recolección de datos”, Revista Ciencias de la Educación, Vol. 19, no.33 pp. 228-247. 2009.
[18] J. Escobar-Pérez, A. Cuervo-Martínez, “Validez de contenido y juicio de expertos: una aproximación a su utilización”, Avances en medición. 6(1), pp. 27-36, Apr. 2008.
[19] M. R. Hallowell, and J. A. Gambatese, "Qualitative research: Application of the Delphi method to CEM research", Journal of construction engineering and management 136 (1), pp. 99-107, 2009.