Construction crew at the Barwa Al Khor Shell Housing site.
QPM, which represents the Barwa Al Khor Shell Housing Project, announced that the project has achieved more than “5mn man hours without a lost time incident (LTI).”
QPM head of health safety and environment (HSE) Alan Crawford said: “This is a wonderful result for our HSE team, which has worked very hard to build awareness of safety issues across the project’s breadth, including contractors and workers at every level.
“Lost time incidents are significant not because of the loss in productivity but because any injury, big or small, is something that must be avoided. QPM’s health and safety record on this project is also a big consideration for Shell who also has very strict HSE standards,” Crawford noted.
According to Crawford, QPM has invested in becoming an accredited Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH) training provider to pass on “much needed skills” to its employees.
“And these results are testament to the company’s efficiency at delivering greater HSE performance through education at every level,” he said.
Barwa Al Khor Shell Housing is a residential development project over a plot of 138,000 sq m designed to house Shell employees in Qatar. It is also part of a future master plan in the Al Khor region.
The residential component of the Shell Housing project extends across a 25,599 sq m area and is comprised of 50 villas, 300 three-bedroom units distributed across 15 five level apartment buildings, and 87,557 sq m of gross floor area.
The Shell compound is custom-built with “high-quality design features and a wealth of amenities,” giving the company’s staff the ability to partake in the “all-essential family lifestyle” they need with homes near their workplaces.
“A team from Shell recently visited the site and expressed their pleasure in the progress made on site in terms of construction and HSE, which is a topic that QPM has stressed considerably since being inducted into the project to ensure efficient delivery and the highest level of professionalism in delivering the end product,” Crawford said.
Shell has committed to fund the IOSH training for the contractor safety team, said Crawford.
He added: “This type of partnership, where a large organisation recognises and rewards the efforts of contractors, is exactly what’s needed if we are to improve health and safety in Qatar. We are working on developing a cultural shift in general contractor mentality in addition to regularly reinforced awareness drives to emphasise the human factor in safety. The initial task has been to make safety the centre of the contractor’s management progress objectives.”
In the past months, QPM hosted numerous HSE-related initiatives for all site operatives including subcontractors. These included ToolBox Talks (TBT) for all site operatives, which highlighted primary safety concerns.