Publication: Health and Safety at work
Issue: February 2015
Mount Anvil aims for OH heights
An onsite paramedic, a web-based reporting tool and popcorn have helped the residential developer
reinvigorate its health provision and increase hazard reporting by 800%. Frances Whinder found out how.
“We had one worker who came to Mark for a medical. He felt fine, but his resting heart rate was 150 beats per
minute. If you exercise at full tilt, you are probably getting towards that sort of number, and even then it’s not
good. Mark took him straight to hospital, where he was treated and his condition is now under control. But this
guy had no idea.” London developer Mount Anvil’s resident paramedic doesn’t only save lives in emergencies,
explains health and safety director Simon Walker.
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Mount Anvil acts as developer and principal contractor on all its projects. “It gives us the flexibility and freedom
to do jobs the way we want to do them in terms of safety, quality, the whole gambit,” says Walker. The firm
employs about 170 people, around two-thirds of whom are on site managing projects, he says. It subcontracts
the rest of the labour, deploying an average of 1000 operatives across six live sites at any one time.
Established in 1991, the firm has grown quickly. Next year it will begin work on Keybridge House in Vauxhall,
which at 36 storeys will be the UK’s tallest brick residential tower.
Partly because of its expansion and the increased complexity of its projects, about 18 months ago the safety
leadership team decided the firm’s occupational health (OH) arrangements needed reinvigorating.
The firm had been using a contractor, which supplied an OH nurse who visited all its sites. “We thought: what can
we do to change this process, to inject something new into it?”
“In the end, we employed a full time paramedic. I met a few people, but when I spoke to Mark Harwood, his
mindset was very much in tune with ours. He was frustrated with being on the reactive side. Being a paramedic,
you are always there when it has gone pear shaped. And he really wanted to get into the proactive side.”
Walker convened focus groups in the months leading up to the change to check how workers would feel about
the switch from nurse to paramedic. “We thought it was the right thing to do, but we took it to our safety
leadership team, which consists of every operational director in the business, and to the site safety meetings,
where we have the project managers and safety managers of every one of the subbies. And we took it to worker
engagement meetings,” he says.
The feedback was positive; all the groups liked the idea of having a paramedic on site, he says, and the operatives
in particular felt it was a service they would use.
This has been borne out since Harwood took up his post in January last year. “We’ve found that people are much
more likely to speak to a paramedic than a nurse. It’s a bit more macho,” says Walker.
Naming convention
Walker’s team are known as safety coaches because he believes they should coach rather than manage. He
thought about retitling Harwood as “occupational health coach”, but decided it didn’t have the same credibility.
Harwood offers free mini health checks — “a health MOT”, says Walker — to everyone on site and conducts
more detailed medicals for safety critical staff, such as scaffolders and tower crane operators. He also organises
campaigns on important health issues, such as prostate and skin cancer.
The mini health check measures blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar and lung function. The focus groups
said medicals were too long and intense, so Harwood has streamlined them to look at the main ill
health indicators, says Walker.
The health MOTs are a hit with workers, he says. “Mark sends out an email announcing the next one, and six
minutes later he has to send a follow-up to say he’s fully booked and will arrange another date.”
As well as spotting the occasional worker at imminent risk of a health crisis, the checks have shown up signs of
unhealthy lifestyles in many others, which could affect them in later life. Almost half of those who have had a
health MOT have been found to have high cholesterol, putting them at risk of a heart attack or stroke.
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“Mark gives them advice and an action plan, and refers them to their GP. Every single person who has come back
to Mark for a repeat MOT has reduced their cholesterol,” says Walker.
High profile
Making sure everyone on site knows that Harwood offers services that will improve their health has been crucial,
says Walker. Digital noticeboards display OH information and there are static OH-specific boards in communal
areas, such as canteens. Every induction pack includes Harwood’s details and information about the services he
provides. “But it’s also about Mark getting out and talking to people. We’ve got him a Mount Anvil branded
paramedic jacket. It really raises his profile.
“He’s out walking the site, getting to know the guys. Asking them: ‘What did you do on the weekend?’ but also
‘Why are you doing that like that? Have you thought about doing this?’”
Harwood splits his time between Mount Anvil’s sites according to the size of a project and its risk profile, so at
the moment, says Walker, he spends more time at Lexicon, a 36 storey apartment tower in Islington, which is in
the topping out phase, than at Dollar Bay, a slightly smaller development overlooking Canary Wharf that is still on
the ground. When Harwood is off site, a sign on the door to his paramedic’s room shows when he will be in next
and gives his phone number, so workers can call and make an appointment.
Harwood — who had been with the ambulance service for 13 years and was team leader for the hazardous area
response team in Bristol, covering work at height, confined spaces, water rescue and firearms medicine — still
does a few ambulance shifts a year to maintain his paramedic status. “He does his CPD [continuing professional
development] because that is important. Should we ever need it, it is important that he has that level of
knowledge that could help us,” says Walker.
On your bike
Though Walker stresses that Harwood has been pivotal in energising Mount Anvil’s OH provision, bringing in the
paramedic is only one of several approaches to improving worker health.
“Because we are trying to change the culture and mindset, we can’t come at it from one angle. We’ve substituted
a lot of the food in canteens for healthier options. We replaced crisps with popcorn because it is healthier,” says
Walker. Meeting room biscuits have been replaced with fruit, so the office based workers noticed the change
too.
“There were a few grumbles at first. People prejudge it. Nobody likes change. But since they have tried it, they
like it and feel better for it,” says Walker. Another change has been providing an exercise bike in the welfare
facility at Lexicon.
“We challenge the guys to go from Land’s End to John O’Groats or do the Tour de France route. Everyone takes
turns on the bike and they can see on a map how far they’ve gone,” he says. This brings out the workers’
competitive spirit: “They compare how they’ve done, ‘Well I cycled five kilometres in that time’, ‘Well I only
cycled three’, and it really pushes them.”
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Non-standard contract
The use of devices that will protect workers’ health is also written into the subcontractors’ contracts. Walker and
his team visit expos to assess new technology, from vibration meters to dust extraction and monitoring devices:
“We spend a lot of time with our commercial teams writing those elements into our contracts. It’s not a standard
one, because not everyone uses vibrating tools, or creates dust. But for example, everyone that uses cutting tools
must use vacuum dust extraction at source.”
Mount Anvil explains the reasons for these requirements to its subcontractors. “We want them to do it not just
because we tell them to but because they can see the benefits. The guys are direct labour to them. If they are
healthy, their production level will stay the same. Once we have educated them, there is very little kick back,” he
says.
Walker estimates that the cost of the new OH programme is about the same as using the external provider. “We
are doing a lot more now. We do more mini health checks, we do more campaigns. There are so many small
things that cost very little. We find that the popcorn and some of the healthier foods in the canteen are cheaper
than the alternatives, so we are saving money that way. The health checks cost very little. The guy who had 150
beats, that is potentially a heart attack on site, with all the associated down time. Really the costs are negligible
versus the gain.”
“A lot of people are scared of OH and scared of the cost. But it’s not one big thing; you don’t have to put a
doctor’s surgery on site. You change the biscuits, you change the health checks, you change a whole number of
small things, and before you know it, the whole culture has changed,” Walker says. “Neither the effort nor the
cost are as bad as you think they are going to be.”
CHAMPION LEADERS
Mount Anvil has been on a drive to improve reporting for both health and safety hazards. “We hold a Safety
Never Stops conference every year, where we get all the directors of all our contractors together, and we give
them a briefing on where we are as a company and where we want to go. And that was all around the drive for
hazard reporting,” says Simon Walker. The event made it clear to the contractors that they would be “patted on
the back”, not punished, for reporting hazards, he says.
“We want to get to the point where it is socially unacceptable to walk past a hazard, whether it is health, safety,
even environmental,” he says.
As well as aiming to improve the attitude to hazard reporting, Mount Anvil is trying to make the process as easy
as possible. “The moment you make it tricky, nobody is going to do it,” says Walker. The firm has invested in a
web based hazard reporting tool; workers can use a smartphone or tablet to take a photo of a hazard and upload
it to the program. This creates a real time hazard log, which Walker and his team use to decide what actions are
needed at each site, based on the principal that targeting the top 20% of hazards will eliminate 80% of accidents.
Since the tool was introduced in January, Mount Anvil has seen an 800% increase in hazard reporting across its
sites, from an average of 82 to 785 a month. Over the same period, there has been a 36% increase in working
hours. “The risk profile of our projects is getting higher. The site footprints are getting smaller; we are going ever
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higher in the air. By sheer probability our accident stats should have gone up,” says Walker. If they had even
stayed the same, that would have been an improvement. But they are going down in severity and number.”
The firm’s accident rate decreased from 366 per 100,000 operatives in 2013 to 123 between January and
November 2014. The number of lost time injuries decreased from 11 to four over the same period.
Maintaining a positive attitude to health and safety with a transient workforce is difficult, he acknowledges. To
get round this, his team look out for what he calls “soapbox champions — the guy in the crowd who everyone
listens to”. The champions are invited to worker engagement meetings, where Walker hopes they will be
enthused by what Mount Anvil is trying to achieve, and get everyone else on board by leading by example.
“It’s a shame, because you get some really good champions, but then that contractor finishes. So it’s a constant
churn. But we find the more people we involve, the more benefits we get. And those people take the good
attitude to other jobs, so it benefits others as well,” he says.
Article written by Frances Whinder for Health+Safety At Work magazine
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