Construction Safety Management, A Systems Approach

Book excerpt: The few models on safety management that are available tend to explain a procedure to manage safety rather than a safety management system. The research carried out here, however, models safety management by transforming a common procedural model (i.e. the HSE's model, 1997) into a functional systems representation. The overall goal of the model is to offer clear graphic lines of influence of its different components on organisational safety. The model is innovative not in the components that it considers but in the representation of those components, which details relative distances between elements and, therefore, opens doors to model-driven hypotheses which account for those distances. Therefore, hypotheses are more accurate in their predictions. This model is firstly explored in the construction sector. Results from this exploratory research support the adequacy of the model to understanding safety management and encourage future research of a more confirmatory nature.