Proactive evaluation of occupational health and safety performance in construction projects using the hierarchy of controls concept

Injury and accident statistics are widely used as 'lagging' indicators and descriptors of occupational health and safety (OHS) performance, despite questions about their reliability due to high levels of under-reporting. In addition, 'lagging' OHS indicators are 'retrospective' measures of things that have already happened and their validity as direct measures of OHS is questionable, especially when studying proactive approaches to improve OHS performance such as Prevention through Design (PtD). Thus, the use of 'leading' indicators of OHS performance has been encouraged. Leading indicators measure the state of OHS before the emergence of OHS risk rather than after the occurrence of undesirable events, or "near misses". As such, they are more direct measures of OHS than injury and accident rates. In an international research study (Lingard et al., 2014 & 2015), an attempt was made to use the Hierarchy of Controls (HOC) as a method to measure the effectiveness of OHS related decision making in construction projects. The results suggested that classifying risk control outcomes using the HOC can provide a reliable and practical measure of the quality of the OHS performance. Building on the findings of the previous research, a tool is developed to evaluate OHS performance and compare the quality of OHS risk control solutions both within and between different construction projects. This paper describes the tool. We argue that the HOC tool provides a more reliable and proactive measure of OHS performance in construction projects. The tool can help decision makers decide on and evaluate the OHS outcomes of their decisions during the early stages of construction projects, or to compare the OHS performance of different design scenarios or decisions.