A healthy outlook

When the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) chose Lawrence Waterman to be its head of health and safety, it made its commitment to health issues clear. Waterman has 20 years’ experience of occupational health in construction, is non-executive chairman of health, safety and environmental consultancy Sypol and immediate past president of the Institute of Safety and Health (IOSH).

We’re building a legacy. Our ambition is that one of our legacies is that health and safety in construction moves on to a higher level.

I’ve got a very easy job because of the level of commitment of everyone around me. Through IOSH I have met thousands of health and safety advisers over the past few years. It’s only a few who are able to work within an environment where senior management is quite so focused and clearly committed.

In the end, the client always pays. It will end up being a question of whether the ODA wishes to see the costs allocatable to individual projects or to see it as an overhead to running the whole programme.

On some projects the client provides occupational health support. On others it’s the major contractor. There is a third model where the contractors appointed by the principal contractor are told that one of the requirements is to pay a certain amount of money for the occupational health available.

We need to make sure that design is informed by the kind of reality check that contractors would bring to it. The challenge is to make sure contractors’ ideas are on board as early as possible. This also applies to FM.

If you invest a lot of money in occupational health you end up with people who can work more efficiently. Workers will get regular health checks, not restricted to health issues related to work. There is an impact of work on health but also an impact of health on work.

Attitudes have changed. There was a lot of “well, it just goes with the job”. I think workers expect to be healthy doing their work, they don’t have quite the same tolerance to being harmed at work, thank heavens.

We want people to be more healthy when they have worked on these projects than when they started. Working should be good for you. If you have got low levels of depression, it’s much better to go to work and interact with people rather than lie on the couch and watch daytime TV.