According to Andre Muscat, Fire Engineer and Fire Safety Management Consultant at SHIELD Consultants, the core purpose of health and safety has been lost in layers of bureaucracy.

“The essence of health and safety management is to create an environment where work can be done without anyone suffering accidents, injuries and ill health,” Mr Muscat explains.

This involves the creation of both tangible and intangible prevention measures such as the purchasing of safety equipment, and the installation of physical means of protection on the tangible part, and the conduction of training and the writing of policies and assessments on the intangible side.

All of this is essential and very important to be able to cover all the layers of protection that are required to ensure the safety and well being of the workers and anyone else who might be affected by the works.

“Unfortunately, all too often, far too much attention is given to the creation of comprehensive documents that detail every aspect that the works are foreseen to involve,” Mr Muscat explains.

“However the authors of such documents are aware that their work will be scrutinised in case something happens and that if something is not mentioned, they will be blamed for the accident. So, this leads authors of risk assessments to concentrate on the inclusion of as much detail as possible so that they are covered in case of an accident. Their defence would simply be, ‘it was written in the risk assessment’ and ‘workers should have acted according to the procedure’ and similar arguments that aim to shift blame instead of preventing incidents.”

It is common for risk assessments for construction works, even simple and straight forward ones to be 50 to 70 pages long. With details processes and work descriptions, that vary very little from document to document, if at all. Those documents are meant to be communicated to site managers, foremen and workers, otherwise they will remain works on paper, and the intangible will never become tangible, and the real protection would have never been applied.

“It is unrealistic to say the least that a worker at any level is going to read through and understand all that is written in these documents,” Mr Muscat says candidly, “with all the clauses and legal references that they are now being written with. Sometimes resembling more something written by a lawyer (with all due respect to lawyers), then a document meant for use on site.”

He believes the industry has confused academic progress with practical relevance. “As far forward as health and safety (H&S) has come in the past few years, too much of this ‘progress’ has been in the aspects of practitioners obtaining academic diplomas and degrees that shape them into bureaucracy machines, document producers, and signature collectors,” notes Mr Muscat.

Meanwhile, very little progress has been made in the quality of the work and the real protection to workers. When a H&S practitioner is sitting at a desk filling forms, submitting applications, filling documentation and dealing with the never-ending paperwork that H&S management seems to require nowadays, that practitioner is in fact away from the place where the work is being carried out and from the workers that will be doing the work.

“We should be asking: ‘Was the correct information obtained? Were the right people informed? Is the required equipment available?’” he says. “Instead, we ask: ‘Was the correct form submitted?’ That tells you everything.”

With this said, Mr Muscat insists that documentation still holds an important part of any kind of management system, including H&S. However, it must not be given centre stage and must not overshadow other important aspects of good communication. More time should be spent on ensuring that the documents produced are better targeted to wards the job carried out and the audience receiving it. “Quality should always be valued over quantity, because documents do not save lives alone, good processes do,” Mr Muscat concludes.