A holistic approach to health and safety for the London olympics

Ros Seal from the Olympic Delivery Authority presented an excellent paper to the IOSH Ireland annual conference, on the holistic approach taken in relation to health and safety for the London 2012 olympic games.

Ros Seal has been with the Olympic Delivery Authority for over three years. In her role as Health and Safety Advisor, she oversees the safety responsibilities for nearly 20 principal contractors and a workforce of over 6,000.

The commitment of the Authority and all stakeholders in the project is clearly having a positive effect. For the most part the accident frequency rate (AFR) for reportable accidents has been lower than 0.18. Especially when you consider than in Ireland the construction sector has an illness rate of around 2.5 per 1,000 workers and an injury rate of around 18 per 1,000 workers.

Since October 2005, the London2012 development has recorded 64 reportable accidents over 37,500,000 hours worked. In fact there have been 13 periods of 1m hours worked without a reportable accident and 2 periods of 2m hours worked without a reportable accident. These are very significant achievements given the volume of work undertaken over a short time period.

Ros indicated that in the near future detailed key performance indicators will be made publicly available on the ODA’s website. We will keep an eye out for this data and will post a summary here.

Ros outlined the Health, Safety and Environmental Standard (4th edition – March 2010) which has been adopted by the Olympic Delivery Authority. This standard covers issues such as:

Roles and responsibilities.
Pre-qualification and tendering guidance.
Design risk management.
Construction risk management.
Construction site management.
Transport.

The standard also includes a number of useful tools.

While the standard has been developed for this large infrastructural project, there are elements that can be applied to smaller projects. The standard is available here and from the ODA website.

Please contact us if you would like to discuss your project and how we can help you manage safety successfully.