THE EFFECTIVENESS OF CONSTRUCTION SAFETY AUDIT SCORING SYSTEM (CONSASS) AND ITS IMPACT ON THE SAFETY PERFORMANCE ON CONSTRUCTION WORKSITES

Abstract

Recent statistics have reviewed that the construction industry is the highest contributors for workplace fatality among all other industries. This has resulted in a greater urgency to improve the construction safety performance on sites. Past studies have discovered that safety auditing is a vital phase in sustaining the effectiveness of safety management system. However, several studies have found that the current methods of safety auditing in Singapore are not standardized. Therefore, the Construction Safety Audit Scoring System (ConSASS) has been introduced since 2007 to improve the standard and quality of current safety auditing systems. Unfortunately, the usage rate of ConSASS has been unexpectedly low. The objective of this research is to determine the effectiveness of ConSASS as well as to establish a relationship between ConSASS and safety performance. Another objective is to compare the effectiveness of ConSASS and the commonly used audit system (CP79) in terms of improving the safety performance on sites. The research is conducted by reviewing the past literature of construction safety audit, interviewing safety auditors, observing four construction sites that underwent CP79 and ConSASS audits and surveying 32 safety-related personnel. From the results, it is concluded that ConSASS has considerable positive impacts on safety performance. Additionally, ConSASS has proven to have a positive enhancement on safety culture. With the justification to encourage the adoption of ConSASS, two solutions have been proposed to solve the current issue of low deployment of ConSASS. In addition, a proposed model has been developed as a guide for contractors to maximize the effectiveness of ConSASS in three stages - Design Phase, Construction Phase and Post-Construction Phase so that the overall safety performance on sites can be improved. Given the relatively small sample size, the alpha level of this research has been adjusted from 0.05 to 0.01 to provide a more stringent test. In the overall context, this research study can act as a good platform for further study on safety auditing and other auditing systems.