Discovering Safety Programme

H&S in BIM

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has launched a programme to explore health and safety in BIM.

If health and safety is to benefit from the use of BIM technology on build projects then it is essential that the range of data needed to make the right decisions from a health
and safety perspective is made readily available and is easily integrated within existing BIM usage.

This provides the focus of a project being delivered as part of the Discovering Safety Programme, a five year research programme, recently commenced, funded by Lloyd’s Register Foundation, being delivered jointly by the UK’s Health and Safety Executive and the University of Manchester. 

A number of representatives from the construction industry were consulted as part of developing the scope of this project. Much opinion was shared on the concept of 'safe by design', that is, the value of effective consideration of health and safety risks at the design stage of construction projects. The rationale behind 'safe by design' is that it provides opportunities for risks to be mitigated through elimination, substitution or by engineering
control at the design stages of a project rather than over reliance on administrative or end of pipe measures implemented once construction operations have actually started, which tend to be less effective options. 

Project aims and Objectives:

At the centre of the work is the creation of a prototype health and safety risks knowledge library with intelligent search functionality from the diverse range of operational data pertaining to construction projects generated over the last 30 years from HSE’s
regulatory activities. This is to be made available to industry to inform health and safety decisions on future construction projects. A key part of the work is to consider how the library might be used in conjunction with existing BIM usage on projects.

Over the past eighteen months, HSE’s BIM 4 Health and Safety Working Group has been working on a new British Standards Institution Publicly Available Specification (PAS 1192 Part 6 'Specification for collaborative sharing and use of structured health and safety information', released earlier this year), to standardise the way in which health and safety data registers for construction are created and structured. The PAS 1192/6 document provides the framework around which the prototype health and safety risks knowledge library is being built.

Programme contact details
For further details on this project, to express and interest in contributing to the initial proof of concept work or for further details on the Discovering Safety Programme more generally, please contact the project team at the following email address: [email protected] health and safety risks knowledge library is being built.

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BIM