Healthier Highways Initiative discussed in Highways Today

Elaine Gazzini, Programme & Technical Director at Connect Plus, discusses the collaborative initiative of ‘Healthier Highways’ alongside Steve Perkins, Managing Director of Steve Perkins Associates in Highways Today.

In the piece, industry health and safety is under the spotlight, particularly the stark imbalance between working on accident prevention and ill-health prevention.

Health, safety and wellbeing is a priority across the M25 network, in addition to being a focus which is shared across the One Community framework. This framework consists of six main supply chain partners - Jackson Civil Engineering, Osborne, Tarmac, Skanska and R&W Civil Engineering, alongside strategic supply chain partner, Connect Plus Services (CPS). Led by Connect Plus, together the framework comes together to collectively develop and share like-minded values, behaviours and initiatives.

Healthier Highways is one of these initiatives, whereby a new collaboration was created with Steve Perkins Associates; initially focusing on increasing awareness of workplace health risks via interactive workshops.

The results of the workshops set the foundations for the Healthier Highways initiative, which is aimed at improving worker health protection on the M25 network through encouraging everyone to Stay Wise, Reduce Risk and Protect Health.

The team selected dust and noise hazards of pavement works as their initial focus areas. Subsequent work revealed the need for improvements, with steps underway to begin do so. Plans are also ongoing to expand on the programme and its approach.

Discussing the initiative and its progress, Andy Dean, CEO of Connect Plus said:

Read more about the Healthier Highways initiative here.