Barriers to learning from incidents in the construction industry of Saudi Arabia

Despite advances in safety performance over the last 30 years, globally the construction sector continues to have a five-fold higher accident and sickness rate than the industry average. Research suggests that learning from incidents (LFI) in the construction industry is low and this remains a chronic issue. Barriers to LFI were identified from literature and interviews with six construction experts in the local construction industry. This was followed by a questionnaire survey of the health and safety professionals in multiple construction organizations in Saudi Arabia, resulting in 75 sets of valid responses. The primary factor that contributes to learning problems is ‘poor quality of actions’ (mitigation strategies) which suggests that construction employees’ involvement is limited in developing recommendations to prevent similar incidents in the future. Another major barrier to LFI is ‘limited dissemination of findings’ i.e., incidents reports are not shared across the organization. Other major barriers include ‘lack of commitment by management’, ‘lack of understanding of how and what to report’ – while recording an incident, and ‘limited quality of incident reports’. Application of interpretive structural molding (ISM) showed that ‘lack of commitment by management’ is the most influential barrier to LFI. Participants identified the ‘intervening phase’ in the LFI model as the most significant phase in terms of possible loss of learning from incidents in construction organizations.