Putting Fusion on Track To Deliver High Speed Rail
Park Health & Safety was invited to take part in a tender process in May 2016 to deliver a comprehensive health & wellbeing programme to cover a 100km stretch of the high-speed HS2 rail network.
Having already earned a well-deserved reputation for innovation and excellence in the field of health and wellbeing for delivering the first-ever Olympic build (London 2012) without a fatality, it was felt that the team at Park was well-placed to support this ambitious construction programme.
It was agreed that the programme, known as Fusion, responsible for early construction works from West Hyde to Warwickshire ranging from ecology and the environment to demolition, archaeology, utility diversions and highway realignments, presented Park with a tremendous opportunity to raise the bar for health support and leadership for employees and neighbouring communities.
Recognising that HS2, through its Safe at Heart programme, is here to push the boundaries of design and innovation, it was a necessary progression for the team to extend this aspirational thinking to making health a primary consideration on site.
By focusing on harm prevention and futureproofing their ways of working by developing a more rigorous pathway of healthcare across the supply chain, just as they had with the 2012 Olympics, Crossrail and Tideway, Park was able to embed the gold standard for ill-health prevention, health preservation and promotion across the Fusion project.
As such, working alongside partners Morgan Sindall, Bam Nuttall and Ferrovial, Park went beyond a traditional reactive and worker-based approach to one of holistic occupational health which allowed it to proactively:
- Eliminate occupational health hazards.
- Limit exposure to health risk where hazard could not be eliminated.
- Ensure staff were fit for the work required of them.
- Rehabilitate workers so that they could continue in employment.
- Provide opportunities for worker to enhance their general health & wellbeing.
THE CHALLENGE:
With a wealth of expertise and practical know-how to call upon, Park was then faced with addressing the question: “How do you provide meaningful mental health and wellbeing to all employees working across a 100km stretch of rail network construction, considering the mobile and dispersed nature of the workforce and the geography of the extended site?”
Melodie Gilbert, Senior Partner at Park and Occupational Health Manager for Fusion, explained:
“The difficulty, of course, is you cannot have an army of occupational health professionals dispensing advice along the whole 100km site. It’s not logistically or financially feasible, so we had to find meaningful ways in which we could provide access to information, making sure it remained timely, accurate and relevant.”
THE SOLUTION:
Using learnings from the delivery of previous successful projects, the Park team was able to create a robust health management plan which used preventative and reactive intervention, rehabilitation and health promotion techniques to support a workplace that aimed to be free of occupational health risks, across the full 100km.
The health management plan defined the scope of the preventative, intervention and rehabilitation health services, which included:
- Preplacement health checks.
- Return to work assessments and reviews,
- Fitness for work screening and medical checks,
- Ongoing exposure monitoring (utilising the occupational hygienist),
- Health surveillance and monitoring.
- Ongoing and comprehensive analysis of health risk and mitigations for them, l Training requirements for project staff and the workforce.
- Physiotherapy and functional rehabilitation.
- The provision of onsite occupational health staff and technicians if required, l Continuous improvement in health performance.
- Ensuring control measures were in place identified by the health risk assessment process.
- Detailing proactive and reactive health performance monitoring arrangements that occurred within the contract.
In addition and perhaps most compelling of all was the inclusion of a wellbeing strategy as part of the health management plan.
The strategy was used to detail how wellbeing was to be integrated and embedded into the on-site ways of working, how it would be able to empower and engage the workforce to embrace positive health changes and how, ultimately, wellbeing was monitored for effectiveness.
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