Chapter 12 Occupational health issues in construction

It has been identified that good quality employment can contribute positively to the different aspects of health identified above (Waddell and Burton, 2006) and both the World Health Organization (WHO) and individual governments have introduced programmes that build on this to improve the health and well-being of populations (DWP/DOH, 2008; WHO, 2010). However, employment can also have adverse effects – the global impact of occupational ill health far outweighs that of workplace accidents, killing over two million each year and causing illness for a further 160 million (ILO, 2013).

Occupational health (OH) is the poor relation of occupational safety despite its higher impact. It may be helpful to consider OH as a slow accident, one which may take many years, even decades, to show its effects. This delay in the outworking of the effects makes it essential that the risks be taken seriously and preventative measures put in place; but it also makes them challenging to address. In the UK government inquiry into the underlying causes of construction fatal accidents, Rita Donaghy stressed that ‘for too long, health has had minimal attention when compared with safety. Thus, while significant progress has been made by the industry on safety issues during the last decade, it has failed to achieve the same for ill health’ (Donaghy, 2009).