Assessment of the Fatal Outcome in case of Violation of the Occupational Safety Rules in the Construction Industry

Abstract

The construction industry ranks first in terms of the number of fatal cases among other types of economic activity. One of the reasons is the dynamic nature of workplaces and the hazards affecting them in construction. To effectively prevent injuries and reduce fatalities, it is required to introduce a risk-oriented approach into the occupational safety management system, which allows to assess the state of the system at any time. It is proposed to assess the risk of a fatal case using the Bayesian approach. To do this, the identification of risk factors was carried out — 10 groups of violations of the occupational safety rules were identified, which are the most common causes of fatal outcome. According to the statistical data of the Federal Service for Labor and Employment, collected on the main participants in production activities in the Russian Federation for 2013–2021, the a priori probability of a fatal outcome was calculated for each risk factor. And based on the statistical data of the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection and the Federal State Statistics Service, collected for all construction subjects of the Russian Federation for 2011–2020, the a priori probability of fatal outcome in construction was calculated. Based on the values obtained, the posterior probabilities of the fatal outcome for each risk factor were calculated. The risk of fatal outcome is presented as the mathematical expectation of damage depending on the number of simultaneously acting risk factors. This allows to assess risk throughout the construction process as risk factors change and are simultaneously affected. The result of the work was a new approach to assessing the risk of fatal outcome in case of an incident in construction, which gives high reliability of the results and allows to correlate the risk with violations of the occupational safety rules. All this makes it possible to take the necessary management decisions in a timely manner to prevent the realization of this risk.