The long term objective of the proposed Center for Innovation in Construction Safety and Health is to lead large-scale work-related accident, injury and fatality reduction in small enterprises in the United States.
Specific aims are: to be an energetic, productive, accessible, collaborative, cohesive team of researchers, who will develop strategic partnerships with a diverse array of construction industry stakeholders; to conduct exploratory, prevention/intervention and translation projects that will be innovative, integrated and multidisciplinary, characterized by a valid and unifying underlying theoretical framework; to actively partner with NIOSH/CDC and its intramural and extramural research programs to achieve a minimum of 30% injury and fatality reduction in the United States by 2010; and to be benchmarked for best practices associated with our exploratory, prevention/intervention and translation projects. The science of socio-technical systems theory will guide multidisciplinary integration. Through its actions and activities, the Center will sincerely value and serve the end user and their families and friends, the American construction worker. The Center will seek and apply benchmarking best practices from other industries (e.g. Mining), other countries (e.g. Australia, UK) and from large construction companies. Human-centered technological innovation will result in a safe and satisfying work site. The Center will value and involve its strategic partners through such vehicles as the Advisory Board and our Worker Protection Panel and NIOSH will be valued and involved as a full partner in the achievement of the Center's vision. The organizational design for the Center is a project x product matrix with projects nested within project type (i.e. exploratory, prevention/intervention, translation). The technical cluster leads comprise the leadership team and ensure that all relevant system factors are considered throughout a given project's life-cycle. They and remaining PIs form the Internal Advisory Committee. In this manner, the Center helps build a body of knowledge about the interrelationships among the construction system subsystems, interfaces and factors, enabling more effective and widespread prevention, intervention and translation. Distribution of projects proposed to demonstrate the comprehensive capability of the proposed Center and to validate its aims and objectives is approximately as follows: 21% - Exploratory, 31% - Prevention/Intervention and 25% - Translation. ? ?
