Construction Accidents and Their Impact on Workplace Employees

Accidents and injuries in the workplace or organization can have a huge impact on a business. These health hazards directly impact an employee’s productivity, reduces sales, lowers staff morale, ruin a business reputation, and in the end, lead to closure.

When talking about different sectors and industries, construction is the significant sector with leading workplace accidents, injuries, or ill health issues.

Construction work is physically demanding and unavoidably accidents and injuries on construction sites do occur from time to time.  

This content piece will explain some prominent hazards that occur at construction sites and what are the consequences for the workers.

General Statistics for Workplace Accidents

It is seen that around a quarter of fatal injuries occur at work specifically in the construction sector in the year 2021/22, according to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). These injuries resulted in 30 deaths in the previous years, including the major sectors like agriculture, forestry, and the manufacturing industry. 

The number of construction worker deaths in the year 2020 was 1,008, with a reduction of 5% in fatal work injuries than previous years, as per the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries.

Effects of Accidents at Work & Hidden Cost

Employers tend to look at different ways and aspect after an accident occur to take immediate actions to ensure they prevent the business and its worker, from leaving the work operations to continue to run smoothly. 

Rather, they should look deeper to find out the root cause of the accident, its impact on the workers, and preventable costs. 

There is a common misunderstanding among people that all workplace accidents and costs can be recoverable through insurance. 

This is not true, the cost acquired due to ill health, accidents, or injuries are often seen as iceberg effects, which are visible and usually recoverable. 

On contrary, there are other hidden costs below the waterline as well which are not recoverable and require up to 10 times greater cost than the insured cost.

What are the Hidden Costs of Accidents?

There are some accidents or injury costs that employers and upper management can easily recover such as the loss of staff or the cost of the vehicle or industrial machinery. 

But hidden and usually unrecoverable costs include:

• Lost production time
• Sick pay
• Extra wages
• Loss of product
• Loss of time
• Legal costs
• Investigation time

Businesses need to cover these costs from their company profits. This requires a lot of budget, so, to avoid such circumstances, employers must take reasonable actions to prevent such health issues from their workplaces.

Construction Accidents Impact on Workers

The impacts of accidents are divided into three categories:

Financial Costs

As discussed above, accidents can present several costs to employers or companies, including:

• Salary cost
• Production cost
• Compensation
• Repair & maintenance
• Additional supervision & care

Physical Effects on the Employees

The majority of the accident cost is related to the loss, both temporary or permanent, physical or mental health effects. The physical health effects on employees include:

• Retired due to permanent injury
• Loss of ability to handle materials
• Long-lasting headaches
• Persistent pain

These injuries create a wide range of both short-term and long-term injuries, which in turn can put a significant loss to a business or a company in terms of finances and legalities.

Psychological Effects

Another prominent health effect of these workplace accidents on employees is the psychological health issues including mental health ailments, stress, depression, sickness absences, and many such health hazards.

This will lead to the loss of productivity which in turn impact the business growth and reputation within the sector. These health effects also show up apart from work while spending time with family and friends and doing leisure activities.

Employers Responsibilities

Construction hazards can range from slips and falls, to falls from height, from hazardous dust to improper handling of the equipment. Being an employer, you must take into consideration any such issue leading to severe health risks to the workers.

It is employers’ responsibility to provide adequate training, instruction, and guidance to their employees and workers to prevent them and comply with the law. 

Some sufficient training courses work on height training, ladder inspection training, manual handling training, and many others.

These courses will help individuals understand their roles, responsibilities, and effective principles to work safely and prevent legal ramifications.

Summary

Workplace health and safety is a serious matter of concern in almost every industry. When comes construction, is the leading sector that is prone to numerous hazards, accidents, and injuries.

This blog post explained some common yet major health hazards and risks occurring in a construction setting, their impact on employees’ health and well-being, and how employers and their staff take part in controlling and minimizing such risks within their work environment.