Construction sites are full of hazards, which is why this profession is one of the most dangerous. Perhaps you have suffered an injury while on the job at a construction site in New Mexico. Despite a lot of work to make work sites safer, construction remains risky, but there is a chance that could change.
Forbes explains that looking ahead the future, there are many ideas of how to create a safer construction site. If the industry learns to make better use of data and begins functioning more as a cooperative industry, it could greatly reduce its accident numbers.
Making use of data
There is a lot of data about construction site accidents, but employers in the industry do not use it to its fullest potential. Through gathering more data and learning how to apply it correctly, the construction industry should be able to reduce accidents drastically.
Experts in the construction industry are beginning to formulate records of accident trends and pinpoint certain safety risks. Managers can then use this information to overcome those risks and focus on putting measures in place to stop common accidents.
Becoming more like manufacturing
The construction industry generally operates with the model where each site is independent. Construction employers overall do not often take lessons learned on unrelated sites and put them into use on their own sites.
This narrow vision can do a lot of harm. Accidents happening on one site may teach that specific crew how to do better in the future, but other construction crews cannot learn from those mistakes.
Employers in manufacturing, on the other hand, harness the power of learning and apply it across the whole industry. Regulators and managers look at incidents that occur and use them to make industry-wide changes to increase safety overall. Due to this, as Forbes describes, the manufacturing industry has become a very well-oiled machine that operates with extreme efficiency and lowered risks.
In the future, the hope is that employers in the construction industry start to focus more on the overall picture and learn to apply lessons across all projects, as well as use the data at hand to make changes. This should reduce accidents and risks on job sites for workers.