Digitising Health & Safety On Site with Emmet Hynes, Health & Safety Director

JJ Rhatigan & Company: Shifting culture while using digital tools to protect people and €1.37 billion pipeline of projects

Health and safety is at the heart of all project delivery. It is the foundation of every successful delivery, upon which design, productivity, and excellence builds. Construction Safety Week 2022 is not just about raising awareness of physical and mental health and safety across the industry, it is about recognising challenges and championing best practice as it evolves.

Across JJ Rhatigan & Company sites, we believe in the importance of promoting positive health and safety throughout the year. People are our greatest asset and it is our people who delivered in excess of 3,500 private and social homes, 12,000 school places, 9 new third-level campus facilities, 2,000 student accommodation bedrooms, close to 1,300 hotel bedrooms, 16 healthcare facilities, and over 40,000m2 of office and commercial space over the past five years. Maintaining a daily focus on the physical and mental health of our people, and striving for continuous improvement of all health and safety practices, is core to the sustainable success of the company.

Technology has been a powerful enabler of this. 

As our Health & Safety team continues the transition to digital ways of working, we are proud to take a leadership position and invest in the evolution of best practice in this critical area. By applying our BIM-first approach to all health and safety processes, including reporting and compliance, stakeholders can access real-time analysis of information. It enables tracking and makes clear where changes need to be implemented.

Health & Safety Director, Emmet Hynes, explains that:

“The creation of a Health & Safety Dashboard by our Digital Construction team enables us to extract critical information from the Autodesk BIM 360 API in visual format, which clearly sets out our Health & Safety performance on a project or organisational basis in real time. From observations identified from our Site Management Team and Supply Chain, right through to closing out these observations, all data is collated to ensure we can outline lessons learned and agree control measures, which can prevent re-occurrences. Having real-time access to this level of information, gives a full picture of team performance and it highlights opportunities for continual improvements”.

Digitising health and safety processes was further facilitated by the introduction of online training and site inductions for all operatives, prior to their arrival on sites. This digital approach allows our Health & Safety personnel to spend time where they are needed – on the ground monitoring and enforcing good safety practices across the team, including our supply chain.

As a main contractor, those people and companies within our supply chain are a critical extension of our team and our commitment to health and safety extends to them. In fact, the JJ Rhatigan Sub-contractor Manifesto sets out our commitment towards employees, sub-contractors and all parties associated with our projects:

‘Safeguarding people will always be our priority and the Health, Safety & Welfare of every single operative on our sites comes before everything’.

In fact, safety is one of a number of key commitments articulated within the Sub-contractor Manifesto, alongside commitments to provide a responsible tender process, open and honest communication, and efficiency of payment.

Sub-contractors are also eligible for consideration as ‘Safety Performer of the Month’ and ‘Sub-contractor of the Month’ which are part of an awards programme introduced by JJ Rhatigan in early 2022 to keep health and safety to the forefront of successful delivery, and to recognise the individual responsibility of operatives towards the safe delivery of projects. Monthly winners of the ‘Safety Performer of the Month’ have the opportunity to be recognised as ‘Safety Performer of the Year’, which comes with a €5,000 prize.

For construction health and safety professionals seeking new opportunities, there are a number of positions available in the Munster region for qualified Health & Safety Advisors with a minimum of three years construction and PSCS experience.

To read this article and others in the CIF Magazine follow this link and head to page 39 – Digitising Health & Safety On Site