Competency Assessment for Designer in OSHCIM
Synopsis
The Department of Safety and Health (DOSH) Malaysia has released the Guidelines on Occupational Safety and Health in Construction Industry (Management) OSHCIM in February 2017. OSHCIM is an approach based on concepts such as Prevention through Design PtD (in the US), Safe Design (in Australia), Design for Safety (DfS) (in Singapore), Construction Design Management (CDM) (in the UK), etc.
The key changes of OSHCIM in comparison to existing OSH legislative frameworks are as follows, where OSHCIM: Applies to design, construction, maintenance and demolition phase (full cycle); Focuses on planning, design and management of construction project; Set the standard/ objective to achieve, but not how; and Main responsibility to the client/developer, principal designer and principal contractor. The fact that OSHCIM is relatively new to the industry, the majority of the industry players (i.e., construction organisations) are still in dark on the subject of OSHCIM. Thus, ability to explicitly highlight into what constitutes organisational capabilities towards OSH over time will facilitate the OSHCIM’s development and transition in the construction industry. Therefore, we believe that by having an OSHCIM maturity assessment model (which is currently absent) i.e., Organisational Capability Maturity for OSHCIM (OCM-OSHCIM) could enable industry players to know exactly what they need to do and how those practices could increase their maturity level in OSHCIM implementation.
Benefits
The OCM-OSHCIM will serve as a robust process improvement tool to enable design organisation to improve their OSHCIM capability. The assessment tool will also provide a mechanism for ascertaining the OSHCIM capability of organisations under the relevant OSH regulations
Helping to nurture the construction-related organisation on the OSHCIM practice, subsequently stimulating better OSH performance through preventive oriented practice
Due to the limitations (e.g., descriptive and checklist-based) on the current organisation assessment (e.g., Construction prequalification questionnaires (PAS 91) in the UK, Checklist of Consideration for Principal Designer and Designers in OSHCIM), a client or design organisation can use this assessment to perform an initial capability assessment to facilitate their decision making in the procurement process.
Benefits for commercialisation
OCM-OSHCIM benefits evaluation should be extended to address broader benefits related to OSHCIM implementation. OCM-OSHCIM should be made freely available as an open source to increase its applicability.
Link
The OCM-OSHCIM excel spreadsheet was available for download as open software via this link:
