Impact of Energy-Based Safety Training on Quality of Prejob Safety Meetings and Control of Hazardous Energy in Construction: Multiple Baseline Experiment

Abstract

Serious injuries and fatalities (SIFs) continue to plague the construction industry. The preponderance of evidence suggests that preventing SIFs requires the identification, assessment, and control of hazardous energy. In this study, we isolated and measured the impact of energy-based safety training on the quality of prejob safety briefs and the presence of direct controls during subsequent work. We conducted a standardized training intervention in both English and Spanish and tested it via a multiple baseline experiment on 10 construction crews working in the US and Canada. Dependent variables were measured using a prejob safety brief quality scoring rubric and the High-Energy Control Assessment (HECA) protocol. The training caused immediate and significant improvements in the quality of prejob safety briefs and a measurable but smaller effect on the HECA score. Whereas prejob safety meeting scores and effect sizes were consistent, HECA was highly variable across the work crews both before and after the training. This suggests that, although short-term impacts on the quality of safety planning may occur over a short time frame, the impacts on the control of hazardous energy may require comparatively more time and data to achieve conclusive results. Methodologically, this study demonstrates an experimental protocol for isolating and attributing the impact of a safety intervention over short periods. Such a protocol may be used in practice to draw casual inferences, and is a step toward the ability to objectively measure the return on safety investment.