Safe hands

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Grahame McCaig.

Buildsafe Dubai expanded in November to encompass the Emirates as Buildsafe UAE. SFS finds out more from Grahame McCaig, Buildsafe UAE chairman and general manager of Dutco Balfour Beatty.

Accidents on-site are an inevitable part of the construction industry. However, understanding risks and dangers can play a huge role in reducing the frequency and severity of incidents.

Sharing information between companies has proved to be a way of enhancing that understanding across a broad spectrum, explains Grahame McCaig, Buildsafe UAE chairman.

"We put our health and safety people together in a room and started talking about ways and means of sharing information, and the benefits that could have for the group," says McCaig, explaining the creation of the original Dubai initiative.

"It didn't take us long to realise if we expanded the group of people that was sharing the information, there was the opportunity to get access to more information and share that within a bigger group, and hopefully prevent accidents from occurring."

Formed in January 2008, Buildsafe Dubai started as a knowledge-sharing group of five companies, sharing information on how to maintain health and safety on construction sites.

Since then, it's grown to be organisation of 74 companies sharing information health and safety best practice, and from November it's expanded to become Buildsafe UAE, covering the whole the Emirates.

Manning the helm of the voluntary organisation is chairman Grahame McCaig, general manager of Dutco Balfour Beatty.

Given the organisation's belief that sharing information leads to greater understanding and safety, expanding to cover the whole UAE was an obvious logical next step.

"We've really opened up the door for people across the country to get involved and hopefully we'll be attracting a lot more information from all these people," says McCaig.

The initiative also provides ‘best practice' updates and ready-made training courses written by its member organisations, which are freely shared across the group. "When it comes to health and safety, there's no intellectual property," explains McCaig.

Buildsafe UAE remains a private initiative. "I'm a true believer in self-regulation. Most of the [health and safety] regulatory authorities that are represented throughout the world would really struggle to regulate the market we've got here at the moment," says McCaig, citing the sheer volume of projects, which he estimates to be around 10,000 in the UAE.

"Dubai Municipality has always had the regulations of what should be done on a construction site. That was brought into law in 1991. Those are fairly comprehensive. If everybody implemented those minimum systems, we would have very few incidents and very few issues with health and safety in the construction industry in the UAE." The problem is that the law is not necessarily enforced, he explains.

According to McCaig, there isn't a ‘safety culture' in the UAE, something which Buildsafe UAE was designed to specifically challenge. "People talk about developing a health and safety culture, and that's very important. Ultimately that's the goal we've got to be striving for," he says.

"You have to back that up with huge amounts of training and development, and explain why it's important. If we do push it from the top, like we are at the moment, you will find in ten years' time it will start to bubble from the bottom and you'll see it coming up through the organisations, and when it comes up through the organisations, you will have a culture. If you've got a culture, it's much better than someone bashing the table. In the interim, you have to push it."

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