According to the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB), it has released its most comprehensive study conducted on mental health and self-harm within construction, which addresses opportunities the industry can take to tackle workers’ poor mental health.
The CITB’s Mental Health And Construction: A Consistent Approach (published on 4 August), backed by the Construction Leadership Council (CLC), explains that the risk of suicide among some site-based workers is three times the national average.
Moreover, a May 2020 report from the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB) entitled: ‘Understanding Mental Health in the Built Environment’ found that 26% of construction workers who responded to their survey had experienced suicidal thoughts, with 97% experiencing stress over the past year.
While the new research highlights a growing number of good initiatives within the industry, their impact is currently held back by the lack of a coherent aim and message, making developing a joined-up approach more urgent to tackle the issue.
Industry culture such as working away from home, heavy workloads and job insecurity, coupled with a lack of understanding for mental health, can exacerbate the problem.
While many employers do provide mental health and wellbeing support programmes to workers in their supply chains, these workers are often not aware that they can access the resources from their principal contractor.
Therefore, the CLC is uniting the industry to agree a plan to seek and tackle the underlying causes of poor mental health, generate better evidence of what impact the initiatives are achieving and develop a more joined up approach.
Meanwhile, the CITB has invested in programmes aimed at helping industry develop skills, behaviours and ways of working that will make it a safer, healthier place to work. Since June 2018, it has funded over 29,000 mental health courses.
The Board’s funding through the Building Mental Health initiative, the Lighthouse Construction Industry Charity and Mental Health First Aid England has helped train over 260 Mental Health First Aid Instructors.
Steve Radley, policy director at the CITB, said: “The pandemic has shone an even brighter light on the need to tackle mental health across society. Construction faces greater challenges than most other industries, but employers are demonstrating their awareness of the need to tackle it. The Building Mental Health programme beat its targets to train mental health first aiders by more than 40%.
“As well as supporting construction workers, tackling mental health will help employers to retain more of them and get the best from them at a time when more firms are reporting skill shortages. We need strong industry leadership on this and it’s great to see CLC picking up the baton.”
Alasdair Reisner, chief executive of the Civil Engineering Contractors Association, who leads the CLC workplace culture workstream, added: “The CLC is acutely aware of the mental health and wellbeing challenges faced by industry. Progress towards improving the situation has been frustratingly slow in recent years and there is no doubt that some of the statistics relating to mental health and construction are not good enough.
“Encouragingly, this report from the CITB includes good examples of best practice from which the whole sector can be inspired. The CLC will provide the shared vision and goals that industry has called for. We will do our utmost to accelerate improvements across the sector, particularly for SMEs, and look forward to collaborating with stakeholders on this crucial construction priority.”
