Ill-Health Still a Major Issue in Construction
2 November 2017
The HSE has recently published their latest health and safety statistics. It is very apparent from the stats that, although we are killing less people within construction, there are still a lot of ill-health issues that need to be addressed.
The 2017 statistics show several key facts including 31.3 million working days are lost due to ill-health and non-fatal workplace injuries. This will be costing Construction Companies many millions of pounds. Along with this they have estimated that the Annual costs of work-related injury and new cases of ill health in 2015/16, excluding long latency illness such as cancer, is around £14.9 billion. These are scary figures and the costs to the industry are quite extreme.
We also note that there are over 1.3 million work related health cases have been reported in 2016/17. Looks like we have a long way to go regarding protecting our workforce and improving their working environments.
However, when we compare ourselves against other European countries, we fare much better than some. France in particular having more fatal injuries than most as well as work related injuries. We are also low in comparison to Poland and France regarding work related sick leave.
We may not be perfect but have come a long way, the hope is that we continue with our successes.