[Image courtesy of Flickr user Matt Brown via a Creative Commons license]

It is said that the only thing that is constant in life is change.

But change is also said to be the toughest thing to do.

So taking those two statements together, life is tough. But death is tougher, especially when it is something preventable.

In the construction industry, advances in safety over the last couple of decades have enhanced worker safety in places where it has been most aggressively implemented. But in some places, change to the status quo has been difficult to come by, and the results have been higher-than-normal incident and death rates in the sector. This seems to be particularly true in the United Kingdom, where more than 5,000 people die each year from construction-related incidents or illnesses (more than 100 each week, or one every 100 minutes).

That number isn’t huge by standards of some countries, but considering the relatively small population of the U.K. compared to all of Europe, or India, or China, or even the U.S., the reality of 5,000 people dying every year is a fairly large percentage of the general population. It is dangerous as an industry in that less than half of construction workers are still employed in the industry when they reach age 60. By that age, they are usually not on a job site, yet the risks were so great that they either quit the industry or died before that key birthday.

To address this concern, the Construction Industry Advisory Committee (ConIAC) Health Risks Working Group and the Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH) have collaborated on a guide to help the construction industry get educated on the changes in construction safety, and to empower workers to take responsibility for their own safety in order to cut down the number of deaths that occur from construction incidents. The goal of the guide is to educate construction firms and workers about the most common occupational risks, gives specific guidance about managing those risks using best practices, and gives resources to gather more information and help with safety protocols.

Safety should always be a priority on any construction site, no matter where it’s located. Yes, change can be tough, but as the workforce constantly changes, so should we as safety officers and companies change and evolve with the times, technology and techniques.