Iran Occupational Health

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 Background and aims: Among different types of occupational accidents in the construction industry, falls and falling objects accidents (group I) account for 44% of construction accidents. Hit by vehicle, electric shock, collapse in the excavation and fire or explosion accidents (group II), while are only 7% frequent, make up about 26% of all fatalities and total disabling accidents. The aim of this study is to investigate these two groups of accidents and to discuss the obtained results in order to identify the potential hazards of construction industry.

 Methods: Data mining methods are employed to analyze data in this research. Hence, 21864 data records which were provided by Social Security Organization (SSO) and were related to construction accidents of the whole country between 2007 and 2011 were analyzed using decision tree and association rule methods.

 Results: In the first group of accidents, the frequency of accidents at night shift is less than the others, and injury to the head, back, spine and lower extremities are more prevalent. The final result is similar to other accidents. In the second group, the frequency of accidents among married and older workers is more than single and young workers. There was a higher frequency in the evening and especially night shifts as well as during the weekends. The injuries to the head, face and neck are greater than the other accidents in this group.

 Conclusion: The results of this study confirm the results of the past research. Hence, utilizing data mining methods has been successful. Policy makers, managers of construction industry and managers of insurance companies can propose preventive actions against accidents using such patterns.

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Background and aims: Construction industry is known as one of the most perilous industries in that it is involving the hazardous projects as well as the high manpower activities correlating with a high rate of work-related accidents. On the other hand, the high rate of accidents in the industry demanding a big budget for the damages; therefore, safety is strongly emphasized in the construction industry projects.
One of the large-scale projects is the construction project of power plant in the construction industry; since they are involved in various administrative tasks, they are extremely complicated and consequently highly susceptible to accidents. Iran hold 15th site in the world' rank in terms of electricity generation and as a developing country needs to boost its electricity production by about five percent annually. On the other hand, some factors indicate the necessities of a focus on promoting safety and a safety culture in these projects; the risky nature of power plant construction, the increment in the number of contracting companies, the size of projects and the complexity of work procedures, and the natural outsourcing of activities, to name but a few.
The accidents of the construction industry caused by a variety of causes are generally categorized into two groups, those which are caused by dangerous situations or physics and ones with the reason correlated to the unsafe behaviors or the actions. Accordingly, many studies have focused on the behavior of individuals as one of the first-line factor of accidents, and it is believed that fostering an appropriate safety culture in the organization and individuals is a crucial strategy lessening the work-related accidents. The safety culture of an organization is the product of group and individual values, perspectives, anticipations, adequacies, and behavior patterns that ascertain the extent of their commitment to the organization proficiency, health style, and safety management. In general, the organizations with a strong safety culture which are gradually enhancing by time effectively prevent from individual and organizational disasters. According to several studies, there are disparate factors affecting the safety culture of the organization and the individuals. Given to the results of numerous studies, the safety investment in the projects has an impact on the safety culture and the safety performance. However, the degree of influence of each safety factor on the culture improvement is not assessed in the previous studies. Furthermore, it is necessary to recognize the effective type of investment impacting on the enhancement of the safety culture, in that the amount of safety investment in each project and the contracting company has limitations. The present study aimed at evaluating the impact of various safety investment methods on improving safety culture in the construction industry projects and for this reason we investigate the thermal power plant projects.
Methods: The current study inspecting the interactive effects of safety investment factors embodying the cost of safety training, the safety incentives, the safety personnel and the safety equipment on the safety culture in the power plant construction projects in Iran. The Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) method explores the interactive effects of various types of safety investments on the safety culture. The SEM as a multivariate method helps us to simultaneously investigate the relationship between independent and dependent structures in a theoretical model. The SEM is one of the most useful techniques analyzing the relationships between variables. Although variables are probably hypothetical or invisible (hidden variables), this method can specify complex relationships between variables.
Among different types of SEM method, the Partial Least Squares SEM (PLS-SEM) method was selected for this study since the data of the study were abnormal and abnormal data can be analyzed using PLS method. Additionally, the PLS method does not require a big sample size and it can compute the hidden structures in the small statistical population by linearly combining the observable variables through their weight relations. The PLS method can also be used both to evaluate hidden (or dependent) variables measured by observed variables (or indices) and to evaluate the relationship between variables (i.e., path coefficients of hypotheses). The software used in this study is Smart PLS Version 2.0.M3.
To achieve the objectives of the research, a conceptual model with four hypothetical paths was presented to investigate the impact of different types of investment methods on safety and ten indicators were used to evaluate the safety culture. The four hypotheses of this study including 1- Cost for safety training has a significant impact on the safety culture 2- Cost for promoting safety and incentives has a significant impact on the safety culture 3- Cost for safety personnel has a significant impact on the safety culture 4- Costs for safety equipment have a significant impact on the safety culture.
Structured questionnaire was used to collect data needed to evaluate the safety culture measurement model and safety investment. The statistical population is the contracting companies involved in the construction of gas, steam and combined cycle power plants to collect the required data. In order to collect the required research information, we made a connection with the project manager of 28 power plant projects, 19 of which participated in the study through which we receive the questionnaires from 62 specialized contractors. Having utilized the data collected from power plant construction projects, the proposed model was empirically tested using the SEM-PLS method and it was determined which method had a significant impact on improving the safety culture.
Results: according to the results of data analysis in this study, the factor analysis of all questions for assessing the indices of the safety culture is between 0.6 and 0.9 which is more than 0.4 and indicates that these criteria are suitable for measuring indicators. Also the results of the measurement model parameters have acceptable reliability and validity. The results of the structural model also show that overall spending on investing in safety improves the safety culture in projects and shows three hypotheses of impact of cost of training, cost of incentives and cost of safety personnel with the path coefficients of +0.46, +0.26 and +0.09, respectively. They were confirmed with 95% confidence level. The path coefficient of +0.46 in the first hypothesis indicates that the investment in the safety training accounts for 46% of the variation in the safety culture variable. Hence, given the significant amount of path coefficients for this hypothesis, it can be concluded that increased investment in the safety training by contractors in power plant construction projects has a significant impact on improving their safety culture. +0.26 as the amount of the path coefficient of the second hypothesis showed that the costs of safety incentives in projects has an impact on the safety culture. Considering the path coefficient of +0.09 for the third hypothesis, which is not a significant amount, it can be concluded that the cost of safety personnel has a small impact on the safety culture; accordingly, merely compulsory investments such as costs for safety personnel, have little impact on improving the safety culture. The fourth hypothesis, namely, the effect of cost of safety equipment on safety culture was not confirmed by t = 1.384 on the bases of significant coefficient. Although this result indicates that the cost of the safety equipment reduces the accidents, does not directly have an impact on improving the safety culture.
Conclusion: Among the various methods of investing in the safety, the cost of safety training has the most significant effect on improving the safety culture of contractors, indicating that the safety training positively improves safety participation, awareness, knowledge, behavior, and motivation. The safety training directly effect on the safety culture. After the cost of safety training, the cost of safety incentives and publicity owned the second place in improving the safety culture. The costs for safety personnel have also been relatively influential on safety culture. The costs for safety equipment have no impact on improving the safety culture. The costs for safety equipment would be effective in the project if the safety training be emphasized to improve contractor safety performance. The results of this study help construction industry contractors to optimize safety culture, therefore, reduce work-related accidents by optimally spending on the safety.
The first limitation is that the research findings is not generalizable. As mentioned earlier, the culture of safety varies across different regions and industries. The findings of this research are based on the information of the construction of power plant projects in Iran and these findings should be interpreted within this limited context. The current study suffers from the other limitation which is the small sample size; since there is limited number of power plant projects and the accountability of the contractors is low. It is worth noting that PLS method, which is the most appropriate method of the structural equation analysis for the data with small sample size, was utilized to solve this problem. Moreover, this study merely investigates the impact of four investment methods. In the future for the future studies, by collecting additional datasets, different factors can be explored in other projects and regions and presented with separated models.

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Background: Field and Objective: In today’s world, there are different building performance assessment standards, which mostly adopt an environmental approach to buildings. Standards are the common language of countries and the world. By providing a common language, a standard can guarantee health and safety for the entire consumers, products, and services. The global village determines a wide range of rights and responsibilities for citizens, including the areas of safety, health, environment, and saving energy. In the building industry, different performance assessment methods are practiced in the world to promote the culture of a healthy life, including the ranking systems BEAM, LEED, and BREEAM. Assessment of building performance is a complex issue because it has to meet several criteria and it is necessary to establish consistency and consistency between these criteria. These include energy consumption, acoustic performance, thermal comfort, indoor air quality and many other issues. Building performance is a critical aspect of organizational activity that is influenced by building maintenance policies and practices.
Today, the measurement of building HSE performance assessment criteria is becoming an essential exercise due to legal processes and rules and individuals’ increased knowledge of the safety, health, environment, energy consumption, welfare, and elegance of buildings. Building performance assessment criteria may be employed to assess the effects of different management activities in this area, consequently providing a good mechanism to supervise the building’s performance to move toward HSE. One of the most important issues in the performance appraisal process is the impact of evaluators' personal judgment on performance appraisal results. Research by some researchers has addressed the impact of appraisal judgments on the appraisal process and has identified this as one of the most important challenges of performance appraisal processes.
The use of multi-criteria decision making models can be very effective in this regard. One of the best practices that can be addressed in this regard is DEMATEL, in which it considers the intrinsic relationships between factors affecting performance indicators. Structural models can be used to determine relationships between evaluation criteria. Interpretive structural modeling approach has been used to increase data analytics capability and reduce system complexity. ISM is an interactive learning process introduced by Warfield in 1973. Interpretive structural models are able to determine the relationship between indices that are interdependent individually or in groups, and to analyze the relationship between indices by analyzing criteria at several different levels.
This study aims to identify and rank factors impacting buildings’ HSE performance via the Fuzzy DEMATEL Approach and Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISL).
Methodology: This study is applicable in terms of objectives and descriptive-casual in terms of methodology. Using available resources and eight experts’ views, 24 factors were identified in four areas: 1) structure, 2) architecture, 3) mechanical, and 4) electrical. Then, they were scored by the experts on the 9-point Likert scale. Those with a mean score above 5 were selected. The experts’ selection criteria were classified into four groups. Then, their relationships and ranks were determined by using DEMATEL and ISM methods. Moreover, the relationships’ strengths and the criteria’s effectiveness and susceptibility were explored via the Fuzzy DEMATEL technique. The ISM and FDEMATEL results were used for two purposes: first, to confirm and verify the results of both methods and second, to improve the obtained results. In this study, the prioritization derived from the FDEMATEL method confirmed and improved the ISM prioritization. By combining the two methods, a conceptual model of building HSE performance assessment can be defined. The reason for using both interpretive structural modeling and DEMATEL is that the interpretive structural modeling method only determines the level of impact of the overlapping factors. And it helps to identify the internal relationships between the factors. In other words, interpretive structural modeling is a good technique for analyzing the influence of one factor on other factors and can help to prioritize and determine the level of factors in a system. Whereas, the DEMATEL method has the ability to quantify the intensity of the interactions among the factors and to show how effective the factors are with each other. Penetration-Dependency Analysis (MICMAC) Impact-dependency power analysis is used to analyze the driving forces and the dependent forces of the variables. The sum of the values ​​in the final access matrix for each element indicates the extent of penetration and the column sum will indicate the degree of dependence. Due to their dependence on conductor factors, they are considered followers. Based on the power of influence and dependency, four groups of identifiable elements will be:
1- Autonomous Attributes: Factors that have weak influence and dependence.
2- Dependent Attributes: Factors that have low penetration power but are highly dependent.
3- Linkage Attributes: Factors that have high influence and dependence.
4- Driver Attributes: Factors that have strong influence but weak dependence.
Findings: The FDEMATEL findings suggested that the structure’s safety, electrical safety, and saving energy in the mechanical area were the most effective factors, respectively, while architectural environment protection, saving architectural energy, and architectural elegance were the least important impacting factors. At the same time, ISM findings indicated that mechanical elegance and electrical welfare in the dependent group were factors with low influence but high dependence, while mechanical environment protection, saving electrical energy, and mechanical health in the independent group were factors with a strong influence but weak dependence. Based on the power of influence and dependency, four groups of identifiable elements will be:
1-Structural health factors, environmental protection of structures, energy conservation of structures, architectural health, electrical health, electrical environment and electrical beauty in the autonomous group: factors that have weak influence and dependence.
2- Mechanical aesthetic factors and electrical welfare in the dependent group: factors that have low penetration power but are highly dependent.
3- Structural safety factors, structural well-being, structural beauty, architectural safety, architectural environmental protection, architectural energy saving, architectural well-being, architectural beauty, mechanical safety, mechanical energy saving, mechanical well-being and electrical safety in Interconnected Group: Factors that have high influence and dependence.
4- Environmental protection, electrical energy saving, and mechanical health factors in the independent group: Factors that have strong penetration power but poor dependency.
Conclusion: There are different performance assessment standards in the building industries of countries in the world to improve health, including the BEAM, LEED, and BREEAM ranking systems. These standards are mostly concerned with environmental problems and energy consumption and none of them consider building performance assessment with safety, health, environment protection, saving energy, and elegance. Performance criteria ranking with the consideration of conditions governing the studied area enables material producers and suppliers in the building industry construct buildings according to the views on the area to enhance comfort feeling in them. Furthermore, the consideration of safety and health criteria in the material provision, construction, and use processes of buildings may increase the health and safety levels of the construction industry, which is referred to as one of the most dangerous industries. The combination of the HSE criteria with energy, comfort, and elegance is one of the most important practices in the performance assessment of the building industry, which was considered in this study. The determination of their relationships, as well as the effectiveness and susceptibility of each criterion and its sub criteria, can be very essential in building performance control and management, which was considered by this study.