[Evaluation of the effectiveness of occupational safety and health inspections of construction sites in the Piedmont region from 2001 to 2005].
OBJECTIVE
To assess the effectiveness of safety inspections in the construction industry in Piedmont in terms of exposure to risk and injuries.


METHODS
We conducted a retrospective analysis of the surveillance activities carried out in Piedmont between 2001 and 2005: to this purpose, we used a logical framework and we identified indicators to evaluate the process and its impact on exposure and injuries.


RESULTS



METHODS
fixed standards involving the number of safety inspections and the type of constructions under control were respected; there was always sufficient diversity among the public works under control, although local health units used different working methods. Impact on exposure and injuries: injury rates in the construction industry in Piedmont showed a decreasing trend and systematically lower values compared to national rates. Injury rates in the "roads and railways" sector showed an increasing trend owing to the great number of public works under construction. In this case, the effect of preventive measures seems less noticeable, but this mainly depends on methodological limits, such as mismatch between numerator and denominator, difficulties in estimating the number of workers actually present on the sites, underreporting of minor events.


CONCLUSIONS
Despite the limitations of a retrospective analysis, the Piedmont safety inspection programme for the construction industry showed coherence with the objectives and had a positive impact on injury rates.
Servizio di Prevenzione e Sicurezza in Ambienti di Lavoro (SPreSAL), Alba, CN. sbruno@aslcn2.it
Santina
S
Bruno
Antonella
A
Bena
Maria Luisa
ML
Debernardi
S
S
Nava
Raffaella
R
Pastore
C
C
Proietti
D
D
Quarta
D000062:Accidents, Occupational / Q000517:prevention & control*; D006801:Humans; D007558:Italy; D016272:Occupational Health; D012189:Retrospective Studies