Exposure Assessment for Acute Injuries on Construction Sites: Conceptual Development and Pilot Test

Abstract

Examination of the causes of injuries in the construction industry through epidemiologic methods has been limited, in part, by the lack of methods to quantify exposure to injury risk. Injury exposure assessment, that is, the evaluation of site conditions leading to increased risk of injury, is particularly challenging in construction because of the nature of the construction process, which is highly dynamic, involves many trades employed by multiple contractors, uses fast-moving, heavy equipment, and may require work at significant elevations. In this article, a method for assessing injury risk in construction is proposed, and a pilot study of its effectiveness is presented. The method uses a construction site as a whole as the unit of analysis and evaluates the risk associated with working on that site. An inspection checklist with ten specific items was developed covering hazards associated with trips, falls from elevations, electrocutions, trenching cave-ins, vehicle-related injuries, and lacerations. The checklist was used by an observer on a random sample of locations within the site. At each location, the presence or absence of each hazard was noted and rated with respect to how well it was protected. The site was then evaluated on the basis of the frequency of each hazard, the average degree of protection, and a summary score which integrated the frequency and degree of protection across the ten hazards. A pilot study was conducted in which three observers rated the hazards on the same randomly selected locations on three sites and two occasions. The results demonstrated that the injury exposure assessment tool is feasible and can distinguish between sites and over time with respect to individual hazards and the summary hazard score. However, there was a significant difference between the observers in both the frequency of hazard identification and the rating of its degree of protection. Before using this risk quantification tool, improved methods for adjusting the observers' scores need to be developed.