Musculoskeletal disorders account for 27% of work-related ill-health in NZ
The musculoskeletal system is made up of the bones, muscles, tendons, ligaments, and cartilage of the human body. Maintaining good musculoskeletal health through prevention and early treatment can make for a long healthy career if you work in the construction industry.
Common injuries for construction workers can range from sprains, strains, and contusions (bruising) which can be caused by heavy lifting, repetitive movement, poor body posture, forcefulness or muscle effort, or the vibrations from continuous use of hand tools. Symptoms of a workplace injury can range from any kind of pain and discomfort located in and around the neck, shoulders, wrists, back, and knees.
When should I seek help if I suspect an injury?
As soon as you detect any pain or discomfort, inform your employer. It may mean adjusting your work for the day so as not to worsen the pain. You can seek medical treatment from a Habit Health physiotherapist if the pain or discomfort is preventing you from working or if you have any concerns. These health experts specialise in a range of areas and can tend to your unique needs before your injury gets worse.
How can physiotherapy help?
Provide support to get back on the tools quicker after injury. They can also assist with creating a return to work process, so employers know if and when workers will return to work. Including working with you to understand what work can be done, whilst you return to full mobility.
Musculoskeletal physiotherapy aims to help the patient recover from their condition more quickly through regular treatment sessions and to develop coping strategies to aid the patient during the recovery process and prevent secondary problems from occurring. This is achieved by manual therapy, education, exercise rehabilitation, and finding alternative ways to accomplish your goals and live your best life. The ultimate goal of your unique treatment plan is to bring your body function back to optimal so you can continue carrying out duties on-site and the activities you love in your personal time.
What can I do to prevent injury?
Prevention and early intervention are key to maintaining a healthy musculoskeletal system so you can carry out your day-to-day duties on-site as well as personal activities you love to do in your own time. Ensure you keep fit and healthy; regular exercise, a good diet, and sleep can assist in keeping your body ready to take on work and recover faster.
Try these simple exercises to help you warm up before you start your shift and continue throughout the day.
Habit Health’s Early Intervention Physiotherapy program
The RESOLVE Early Intervention Physiotherapy Program provides proactive support for your team, helping them get on top of pain, discomfort, or minor injuries quickly.
The program enables your employees to access a physiotherapist quickly to treat musculoskeletal issues. Early intervention can improve your employee’s health and well-being and help them to return to full fitness sooner. It can also reduce workplace costs resulting from pain, discomfort, or injury, and related absenteeism.
Inductions are mandatory on all construction sites and are essential for both yours and your team’s safety. We want to make sure you get home safe at the end of the day, so prioritising your H&S is a must.
A site induction is necessary to inform workers of the dangers and risks associated with their work at the start of each project. No two projects are alike, and each has its own set of teams, tasks, work types, environments, risks, activities, and layout.
It’s important for everyone on-site to have a clear understanding of the risks involved. Site inductions are designed to protect people, so it’s crucial we all do them.
At times, a supervisor may not be available on-site to perform an induction. That’s why we’ve made it easy for everyone to conduct an induction on-site. The HazardCo app allows you to complete a site induction easily and digitally, and it be accessible to your entire team.
Our site induction process includes a QR code that can be scanned on-site, acknowledging and reading the site-specific safety plan. With all the necessary information in one place, workers will know what the site/task-specific arrangements and regulations are.
Conducting site inductions properly can save time, stress, and lives. Get in touch with the HazardCo Team to see how we can help you.
If you’re a HazardCo member, click here to find out more on scanning on-site and completing an induction.
If you’re not, click here for a 7-day free trial.
Dry sandblasting, grinding, cutting, sanding, polishing, and drilling of silica-containing materials like concrete, rock, glass, asphalt, cement and engineered stone are considered hazardous tasks in construction. This is because you create silica dust that is too small to settle that floats around undetected in the air that can be breathed in by you and those around you.
The tiny silica dust particles can penetrate your respirator if you aren’t careful. Make sure your respirator has been fit-tested and isn’t worn over a beard. You must also have the correct filters, as Silica dust is 100 times smaller than sand and can penetrate some filters.
Step 1: Understand what happens when you inhale silica dust.
Step 2: Know the silica content of your construction materials and substitute for less hazardous materials!
Damage to the lungs from silica dust and symptoms of disease may not appear for many years. Workers may not show any symptoms, even at the point of initial diagnosis, which is why prevention and health monitoring is critical. Often workers are diagnosed during routine health monitoring, as chest X-rays may show scar tissue formation even if you are without symptoms. Silicosis symptoms may include a dry cough, shortness of breath, fatigue, fever, chest pain, and unexplained weight loss. Silicosis also increases your risk for other conditions like lung cancer, chronic bronchitis, kidney disease, and some auto-immune diseases.
Tell your doctor about your current or previous exposure to silica dust. To rule out silicosis, respiratory questionnaires, lung function tests, chest X-rays, and CT scans may be required.
Early detection of silicosis, before symptoms develop, can motivate you to stop further exposure, and improve your health outcome.
If you were exposed to silica dust currently or in the past, even if you wore respirators and even if you have no symptoms, you need routine health monitoring. Talk to your employer. Tell your doctor about your exposure. Engineered stone workers must see specialist occupational health doctors. Early detection is most important!
It is important to understand that there are very likely specific requirements you need to meet to ensure you are appropriately managing the risks. WorkSafe has plenty of information available to learn more. We have provided a few key links below for you:
You can also contact our friendly team if you have any questions.
Construction, agricultural, horticultural, or manufacturing, no matter what industry you’re in electrical equipment will be present. To ensure your electrical equipment is safe and in good condition you should do daily inspections before use and your equipment testing and tagging should be done.
Testing and tagging is checking the safety of portable electrical appliances that get used in the workplace.
It involves two steps: Visually inspecting the appliance for any noticeable damage,
And secondly, electrically testing it with a Portable Appliance Tester (PAT). Once tested and approved, a tag is attached with the following information:
Testing and tagging helps identify any faults or damage in the equipment that could potentially cause harm to individuals or the workplace. If tested appliances are found to be non-compliant or unsafe, they must be labeled accordingly and withdrawn from use immediately.
Anyone with the knowledge, skills, tools, and understanding of the standards involved can conduct testing and tagging. If the testing reveals any issues or something needs fixing then a registered electrical worker will be required.
In short, basically any electrical corded power tool or device. This includes any device or appliance that has a flexible cable, and a removable plug, and also includes both single and three-phase connections. This applies to new equipment before it is used, and also needs to be carried out on second-hand appliances intended for sale.
Keeping you and your workmates safe at work is a priority, so make sure you are aware of the businesses testing and tagging requirements in the workplace.
The HazardCo App site review resource has a list of electrical controls that should be in place to minimise the risk of electrical hazards.
If you have any questions get in touch with the HazardCo Team
As a building company, you’re responsible for the H&S of everyone on-site, not just your direct employees. We know that getting contractors involved in H&S is a big challenge for building companies and is exposing you to additional risk.
Of course, building companies often tell us that although they have some influence over contractors on-site, getting them to engage with health and safety is a challenge, as they don’t have the same level of control over contractors compared to direct staff. Too often, contractors arrive on-site without an established H&S system and need a lot of support from the main contractor. If they do have their own system it creates a paperwork nightmare for the building company that is responsible for ensuring reports are completed and collected.
First, you need to make sure contractors have the right skills and experience to do the job, and second, you need to make sure they are going to carry out the work safely. Once they are onboard, you need to monitor throughout the build if the contractor is following good health and safety practices on-site.
We’ve created a number of new tools that will help you to manage your contractors before they begin working with you and while they are on-site. We’ve also made it easier to monitor your contractor’s H&S activity, even when you’re in the office. It’s one system for everyone.
Pre-site – Do your homework before you start working with contractors to reduce the risk to your business
On-site – Love the HazardCo app? Now contractors can use it too. One H&S tool for everyone under one roof
Oversight – Get the big picture view of all H&S activity taking place
Managing your contractors and ensuring their safety on-site is non-negotiable, so make it simpler, and let our digital and automated tools simplify contractor management and do the heavy lifting for you. Get in touch with the HazardCo team to find out more about these pre-qualification tools, and how we can help you to manage contractor safety on-site. If you have any questions get in touch with the HazardCo Team.
According to WorkSafe NZ, a near miss is defined as an incident that occurs but doesn’t lead to injury, illness, or damage.
No matter what working environment you are in, work sites nationwide have near misses every day. On-site, a near miss could be tripping over stacked material, it could be dropping the hammer off the scaffold onto the ground or backing the truck and narrowly missing the boss’s ute. While these seem fairly innocent, they could have been more serious.
Like other incidents, these near misses need to be recorded and reported as soon as they occur. Once they have been, you can look into what caused the near-miss and put steps in place to avoid it turning into something more serious.
Near misses should be considered the same as an incident. But often they aren’t.
We often find that near misses are very rarely reported, and actually brushed off. Near misses are just as dangerous as actual incidents. If you’ve had a near miss, you might have got lucky but someone else might not. Treat near misses as a free learning tool to put controls in place to prevent more serious incidents from occurring.
By encouraging near miss reporting, you can start to see patterns and gain valuable insights on where to best focus resources into safety.
Reporting all near misses and incidents on-site, is all about helping to prevent harm. Everyone on-site has a right to know of potential threats that may impact them, and everyone plays a role in keeping everyone safe on-site.
Getting everyone to report near misses and incidents creates a culture of open, honest discussions about health and safety.
Best practice is that all incidents, whether they cause injury or not, need to be reported and added to your incident register.
The more reporting you have, the more data is available for those in a position to influence change, as it can help them to see areas that require improvement or to see how effective implemented controls have been.
No matter how big or small, report all near misses and incidents so you can all learn from them. Using the Report Incident feature on your HazardCo App, fill out the fields to capture what happened. Your reported incident will be added to your incident register in the Hub, and HazardCo retains this for as long as you’re a member.
Ensure you take incidents and near misses seriously and investigate them. Investigations help you work out the root cause so you can put corrective actions in place to prevent a recurrence.
We all dread an incident occurring, but if anything serious happens on your site it’s important you are prepared, remain calm, and do the right thing. When in doubt, call HazardCo – we are here to support the health and safety needs of all HazardCo members 24/7. If you’d like to learn more about the App and the Reporting Incident tool take a look at our short demo videos
A total of 1029 incidents have been notified to HazardCo so far this year – 276 of these were finger and hand related. Given the frequency, we want to look at the impact of these injuries and how to manage them better.
There are a fair few ways these occur on-site. The most common include:
The causes are often the result of equipment malfunctions, falling objects, compression between objects, electrical faults, and worker errors.
Hand tools are a huge contributor to hand related injuries in the workplace. When using these common tools, hammers, hand saws, pliers, angle grinders etc fatigue, rushing, complacency, using faulty or damaged tools or a lack of training often leads to workers injuring themselves
The long-term impact of a hand injury ranges from minor to severe. A minor injury could mean changes in grip strength and reduced range of motion of the fingers. In more serious cases, a worker may lose the ability to use their hand.
Awareness is everything. You can educate your staff in the following ways:
This is more than just talking to your workers, as a leader you need to give your workers real-life examples of incidents that have life-changing effects on workers: their health, finances, family and livelihood.
Once workers have the knowledge, it’s up to them to maintain hand safety awareness. Team leaders, however, need to ensure they monitor and review the workplace to ensure controls are in place / being used.
Leading the way in safe practices to reduce the number of hand injuries on site.
If you’ve got a question about hand injuries or any other health and safety matter, the HazardCo Advisory Team is here to help. Give them a call on 0800 555 339, option 4.
“Contractor management” is a health and safety term used by building companies. It’s referring to the process of checking if your contractors are competent and work safely.
Your obligations as the main contractor are pretty straightforward. First, you need to make sure contractors have the right skills and experience to do the job, and second, you need to make sure they are going to carry out the work safely. Once they are on board, you also need to monitor if the contractor is following good health and safety practices on-site.
Collecting evidence of this process is important so we recommend putting a system in place so nothing falls through the cracks.
Pre-qualification company checks once a year:
Induction of workers:
On-site induction of workers:
On-site health and safety:
As a yardstick, good health and safety on-site would be your contractor completing at least two Toolbox Meetings and Four Risk Assessments each month, and a Task Analysis anytime high risk work is carried out.
Stay on top of these checks with an automated system.
Get peace of mind your contractors are good to go, with an automated system to pre-qualify your contractors, check insurance, trade qualifications and more. As it’s automated, you won’t have to chase contractors for outstanding documents, and you’ll even get a notification if someone scans-in who hasn’t been approved.
Find out more about HazardCo’s Pre-Qualification Tools here, or get in touch with the team by giving us a call on 0800 555 339 or email info@hazardco.com
When risks and hazards are recognised early, controls can be put in place to prevent harm to workers, visitors, and the public.
Reporting and controlling hazards/risks is a way of being proactive and helping create a safe environment for everyone to work in.
A key part of the Health & Safety at Work Act 2015 (HSWA) and regulations is the need to both identify these hazards, and then manage the risks involved so they are either removed or controlled correctly. Creating a Task in the HazardCo App to report the hazard is a simple and effective way to manage this responsibility.
There are always going to be hazards and risks on construction sites; they are dynamic places. Identifying the hazards that could cause serious injury or harm to both workers’ health and safety helps manage risk as the project moves along and helps those who manage the jobs plan for them better in the future.
For example:
The concrete pumping truck has a blockage on-site, and the team decides to try and rectify the blockage whilst other workers are in close proximity. Joe is aware of the hazards and risks of clearing blockages under high pressure, and that someone could get seriously injured if things go wrong. He recommends that the concrete pumping team stop and do it away from other workers in a safe location. Because no incident or near miss occurred of anyone getting or nearly getting hurt, Joe logs this hazard as a Task in the HazardCo App.
The company reviews all the tasks that have been logged for the project and sees Joe’s reported hazard. With new knowledge of the dangers involved and the controls used to manage the risks of concrete truck blockages. The company decides to use those controls on all sites going forward.
Hazard reporting is an effective and ongoing way for workers to raise concerns or suggest improvements on a day-to-day basis, whilst also helping PCBU’s meet the worker engagement and participation duty under the Act.
Hazard example:
Joe notices an extension cable has been badly damaged and is still plugged in. He turns off the power and removes the cable from services and logs it as a Task in the HazardCo App before someone could get hurt.
Reporting hazards as a Task in the HazardCo App helps with:
Near miss example:
Joe sees a fellow worker about to roll up a badly damaged extension cord whilst it is still plugged in, he immediately stops the worker before he could have got hurt. Turns off the power and removes the cable from service and logs a near miss as an Incident in the HazardCo App.
Reporting a near miss helps with:
If you have any questions get in touch with the HazardCo Team
A Person Conducting a Business or Undertaking (PCBU) is essentially any business doing work of any sort. PCBU’s are required to ensure the health and safety of workers, other contractors, or visitors who might be affected by work operations.
If you are the main contractor engaging contractors, then ‘workers’ will include not just your direct employees but all engaged workers including other PCBU’s employees.
When it comes to overlapping duties, businesses need to consult, coordinate and cooperate so they can all meet their shared responsibilities.
*These listed duties are not in their entirety and have been simplified for readability. This is not a full list of duties, it is important to make yourself familiar with health and safety duties. WorkSafe has useful information at WorkSafe.govt.nz, or talk to our Advisory team if you have any questions.
For example, a builder calls a supplier for some material to be dropped off at site, they coordinate that a HIAB is the best way to deliver the goods. The builder will communicate via a Toolbox Meeting to the team that the materials will be delivered, to create a clear stable area for drop off, and to keep clear of the HIAB while offloading.
You will need to consider the extent to which you can influence or control the risk in question.
Ultimately, the more influence and control you have over the site or workers, the more control you have over the risk – the more responsibility you have.
Health and safety doesn’t just start at the building site, it will span throughout the entire build cycle. It can start as far back as the concept and design, choice of materials, pricing, and scoping of the works.
Keeping people safe should always be the top priority on any construction site. And what’s more? Health and safety laws actually require this to be the case. Aligning yourself with other parties, and knowing what safety systems are in place is vital and could save lives.
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Stay on top of these checks with an automated system.
Get peace of mind your contractors are good to go, with an automated system to pre-qualify your contractors, check insurance, trade qualifications and more. As it’s automated, you won’t have to chase contractors for outstanding documents, and you’ll even get a notification if someone scans-in who hasn’t been approved.
Find out more about HazardCo’s Pre-Qualification Tools here, or get in touch with the team by giving us a call on 0800 555 339 or email info@hazardco.com.
