Deaths and injury among migrant construction workers could be cut by up to 20% simply by including pictures in safety training, research has revealed.
Statistics from the Health and Safety Executive show that migrants, who comprise 6% of the UK’s 2.3 million construction workers, are more likely to be fatally injured than native UK employees and account for a disproportionate 17% of work-related deaths in the sector.
Between April 2005 and March 2008, some 25 foreign workers were killed in the UK construction industry. Among the reasons cited for the high level of migrant worker injuries were language skills, cultural differences and inexperience or a lack of understanding of UK health and safety standards.
As a result, the project, which was commissioned by the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health and carried out by Glasgow Caledonian University, saw senior research fellow, Billy Hare, provide health and safety training to more than 80 migrant workers across four construction sites in London and Manchester.
He used a combination of sketch drawings, pictograms and photographs to translate the safety message, and test scores showed that understanding levels soared as a result, in some instances increasing by as much as 20%.
Ensuring sustainable change
Hare said: “This improvement shows that there is currently a gap in migrant worker training as crucial occupational safety and health information can be lost in translation. After all, the standards, work methods and equipment used on UK building sites can be different to those that migrant workers are familiar with so they may need extra support with understanding the risks a completely new environment presents.”
IOSH’s executive director of policy, Dr Luise Vassie, added that, even though employers had a legal duty to make safety information understandable to all employees no matter what their language ability, it appeared that some could do more.
"Based on these results, we might assume the number of migrant worker injuries and deaths on building sites could be cut if images were used as standard in training. We’d urge construction companies to take this on and we’d also encourage management to consider this worker group more when looking at their health and safety systems,” he added.
But employers needed to do more than simply translate instructions into their workers’ first languages and furnish them with multi-lingual supervisors.
Hare explained: "Doing this alone can actually lead companies into a false sense of security because, in fact, many workers – whatever their country of origin – have literacy issues. We can’t assume that everyone is able to read instructions, so pictures overcome these issues and enhance what already exists.”
In terms of measuring how the use of images during safety training affected workers’ behaviour, the results showed that, while it improved initially, it often dropped off over the longer-term, which meant that messages had to be re-visited on a regular basis in order to affect consistent and sustainable change.
