The impact of health and safety investment on construction company costs

• The impact of health and safety investment on construction company costs is presented.
• We analysed a total of 40 constructions work in progress in southern Spain.
• We observed significant differences in accident rates and prevention costs by stages.
• Application of the Poisson model enables us to predict the number of accidents.

This paper presents the most significant results of a study of the impact of health and safety investment on construction company costs. A questionnaire was designed and applied to a sample of a total of 40 construction works in progress in southern Spain. Analysis of the data produced reveals the interrelationships between variables relevant to the management of risk reduction, including the costs of safety measures of risk reduction, the occurrence of accidents and their cost, the material operating budget for the project and the health and safety plan budget. On the other hand, bivariate analysis of the initial hypotheses shows that the complex relation between the occurrence of accidents and their cost cannot be explained by any single variable. The predictive model that best fits the sample data is the Poisson truncated distribution. The results obtained with this distribution show that the average number of accidents varies directly with the total number of workers, the average number of subcontractors and the health and safety budget, while it varies inversely with the cost of accident prevention.