Lung Disease in Construction is Unacceptable

Posted on June 6, 2023

There’s a big push these days to create clean air zones in and around our most populous places to create greener, healthier conurbations, because air pollution has a real impact on people’s health.

According to the World Health Organisation air pollution is the single most serious environmental threat to human health.

Dust kills

If walking down a busy street can harm you, then consider what it might be like on a construction site or in an indoor workshop! So serious an issue is it that, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has just launched a Dust Kills campaign targeting how dust is being managed.

It focuses on the respiratory risks to construction workers from exposure to silica and wood dust and will remind employers that they have a legal duty to control dust effectively and protect their workers’ lung health. HSE inspectors will also work to raise awareness of health issues in relation to dust exposure and the importance of effective control measures to improve the long-term health of those working in construction.

This is about balancing both sides of health and safety. We often concentrate on the safety side of things because it’s acute, it happens quickly and results can be seen immediately. The health side can take a long time to show, it’s chronic, it’s drawn out.

Part of the job

The big issue is that breathing in dust can be seen as just ‘part of the job’. If you talk to a plasterer when he’s mixing up or a bricklayer when he’s raking out bricks, they often see dust precisely in this way. But society has changed and so, rightly, a spotlight has been turned on and we are now asking how can we address this issue because lung disease in construction is simply unacceptable.

When I visit a company it’s very easy to see missing guards, slip hazards and poor electrical safety, but less easy to spot are the health red flags that cause, for example, muscular skeletal problems or those vibration and respiratory hazards.

So when I’m talking to the site operatives, I start by asking what hobbies they have. Why? Well, it used to be reasonably acceptable for an employer to get his workers to the end of the shift and not be hurt, but now what society expects is that we should make workers arrive at retirement age to be able to continue enjoying their hobbies or walk up the stairs or even put their socks on!

They should still be able to go wild swimming, take the dog for a walk, play golf, play with their grandchildren when they reach 65. Yet, if you have repeatedly and over long term been exposed to airborne hazards that can affect your health there’s a strong likelihood that you might end up suffering from lung damage and the quality of your life long term will be badly affected.

Behavioural change

Don’t get me wrong, there’s so much good practice out there already, for example, there are lots of construction sites operating a ‘ban the brush’ policy because it creates dust. There are also attachments for tools that create dust – local exhaust ventilation, or extractors for tools that are operated via Bluetooth, and there’s ever-improving PPE including respiratory protection. This is about behavioural change.

At Courtley Health and Safety we highlight dust awareness, alongside other substances like chemicals, vapours, biological agents, through our Control of Substances Hazardous to Health

(COSHH) training courses. We also offer a face fit testing service suitable to all individuals. (I will write more about this in the next blog.)

We can’t dig in and avoid change. We have to do this by highlighting where errors are being made and creating good and effective behaviours and this is key. We may do COSHH assessments or safe operating procedures, but a bit of paper hardly ever saved anyone’s life – it’s the change in behaviour that that bit of paper creates.

There was a time when we smoked in pubs or aeroplanes, but we can’t imagine that now, because we know it’s bad for health and we created a behavioural change that’s become the norm. The thrust behind the HSE’s campaign is therefore to be better than we currently are.