Sector · Construction and civils
Health surveillance for construction and civil engineering
Construction's surveillance problem is not clinical complexity. It is that the workforce moves: between sites, between subcontractors, and in and out of the business. A surveillance cycle assumes people stay still long enough to complete one.
What you owe
The programmes this work triggers
| Programme | Usually triggered by | Who tends to be in scope |
|---|---|---|
| Hand-arm vibration | Breakers, disc cutters, grinders, compaction plates, chipping hammers | Groundworkers, demolition, concrete and finishing trades |
| Audiometry and hearing | Breaking, piling, cutting, plant, general site noise | Most site-based trades, particularly demolition and groundworks |
| Respiratory | Silica dust from cutting and drilling, wood dust, some coatings | Cutting and drilling trades, joiners, sprayers |
| Skin and dermatitis | Wet cement and chromate, epoxies, resins, solvents | Groundworkers, concrete gangs, screeders, flooring and waterproofing |
| Safety-critical medicals | Work at height, confined space, plant operation, driving | Scaffolders, steel erectors, plant operators, confined space teams |
| Night-worker assessment | Possessions, road and rail work, shutdown programmes | Anyone on regular night possessions or shutdown work |
Indicative, not a substitute for your own risk assessment. What you actually owe follows from your measured exposures and your rostering. The surveillance check gives an estimate in about two minutes.
The blind spots
Who gets missed
Surveillance populations are usually built from an obvious list of shop-floor roles. These are the people who fall off it.
- Short-tenure and labour-only subcontractorsThe single largest gap in the sector. Someone on site for eleven weeks is exposed for eleven weeks, but every surveillance process assumes an annual cycle and a stable employment relationship.
- Workers who left before the cycle came roundThey were exposed, no baseline was taken, and there is no record either way. That is precisely the position a civil claim exploits years later.
- Site management and supervisorsOn site all day, exposed to the same noise and dust, but classified as staff rather than operatives and therefore off the surveillance list.
- Plant operators between contractsFitness for safety-critical plant tends to be checked at induction and never revisited, even when the same operator is with you for years across different projects.
Where it fails
The failure mode in this sector
The sector's characteristic failure is the incomplete cycle. Surveillance is designed around an annual rhythm, and a meaningful proportion of the exposed population is not there for a year. So baselines never get taken, follow-ups never happen, and the records that do exist describe the people who stayed, who are not the people most at risk.
The second failure is fragmentation. On a project with several subcontractors, each holds its own records in its own format, and the principal contractor discovers at audit that it cannot produce a coherent picture of who on its site was exposed and to what. Neither problem is solved by trying harder; both are solved by making the baseline cheap and instant enough to do on day one rather than at the next clinic day.
Questions
Common questions
Who is responsible when a subcontractor's workers are exposed on our site?
Duties overlap rather than transfer. The subcontractor has duties to its own employees, and the principal contractor has duties in respect of the work it controls and of people affected by it. In practice the defensible position is knowing who is exposed on your site and having assurance that surveillance is in place, whoever is delivering it. "We assumed the subcontractor did it" is not an assurance process.
How do we run surveillance for people who are only here for a few months?
Get the baseline done at induction rather than waiting for a cycle. A questionnaire-led baseline can be issued to a worker's own device on day one, which converts the hardest case into the easiest one. It also means that if they later develop symptoms, there is a record of where they started.
Is a HAVS questionnaire enough, or do people need to see a clinician?
The annual screening questionnaire, Tier 2, is enough for most workers most years, and a trained responsible person can administer it. What matters is that a positive answer routes onward to a qualified person rather than being filed. That escalation is the part that breaks in manual systems, and it is automatic on the platform.
Start here
See what your sites actually owe
Four questions about your workforce and its exposures, and an estimate of the assessments owed each year by programme. No sign-up, no personal data.