A Harvard Public health student used her dissertation safety tips to enhance safer construction sites around Boston.

Photo by Emily Cuccarese | Harvard Chan

Building Safer Construction sites

Emily Sparer may be the first Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health student to have construction workers cheering her on at her dissertation defense. Sparer, who graduated in May with an SD in occupational safety and ergonomics, developed a B-SAFE safety communication program for construction sites built on a simple, low-cost idea: Take the safety data that managers already gather and share it with the workers.
Posters at Sparer’s pilot sites around Boston displayed safety scores each week, broken down by subcontractor, to encourage workers and managers to look at conditions outside of their own area and trade. Sites with high ratings earned a free lunch at the end of the month. As a result of participating in the program, workers are reporting improved teamwork and better communication around safety—and they want it to continue.
“At my defense, one of the construction workers in the audience said that he and his coworkers had met with their corporate-level safety people to see if they could adopt the program companywide,” Sparer says. “That felt like completing a circle—I developed the program, tested it, and now it’s being implemented on work sites. That’s what I want to do with my work: take it beyond a published paper into the real world.”

Harvard T.H CHAN.