DEVELOPING AND VALIDATING A MODEL TO EVALUATE THE HEALTH AND SAFETY OF SUSTAINABLE BUILDING PROJECTS

ABSTRACT

Despite recent efforts aimed at promoting sustainability, very little has been done to integrate health and safety into the sustainability evaluation of the built environment. This research aimed to develop and validate a sustainable health and safety maturity model for evaluating the maturity of the health and safety practices of sustainable building projects. A detailed literature review was used to develop the model which consist of 22 safety maturity drivers and 251 critical to safety practices, after which it was subjected to an analytical hierarchy process and validation by expert judgement. The results showed that the most important safety maturity drivers were “risk and hazard management” and ‘incident investigation, performance and evaluation,” while the least important were “health and safety in contracts,” and ‘alcohol and drug testing.” Findings point to a potential relationship between the relevance of the safety maturity drivers and their relative importance in sustainable building onsite safety management. Construction organizations can use the model to evaluate and improve the maturity of the health and safety practices implemented on their sustainable building projects.