An empirical survey of the benefits of implementing pay for safety scheme (PFSS) in the Hong Kong construction industry

Abstract

The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) has implemented different safety initiatives to improve the safety performance of the construction industry over the past decades. The Pay for Safety Scheme (PFSS) which is one of the effective safety measures launched by the government in 1996 has been widely adopted in the public works contracts. It is obvious that both the accident rate and fatality rate of public sector projects have been decreased noticeably over this period. This paper aims to review the current state of application of PFSS in Hong Kong, and attempts to identify and analyze the perceived benefits of PFSS in construction via an industry-wide empirical questionnaire survey. A total of 145 project participants who have gained abundant hands-on experience with the PFSS construction projects were requested to complete a survey questionnaire to indicate the relative importance of those benefits identified in relation to PFSS. The perceived benefits were measured and ranked from the perspectives of the client and contractor for cross-comparison. The survey findings suggested the most significant benefits derived from adopting PFSS to be: (1) "Increased safety training"; (2) "Enhanced safety awareness"; (3) "Encouragement of developing safety management system"; and (4) Improved safety commitment. A wider application of PFSS should be advocated so as to achieve better safety performance within the construction industry. It is recommended that a similar scheme to PFSS currently adopted in Hong Kong may be developed for implementation in other regions or countries for international comparisons.

A comparative study of critical success factors for public private partnerships (PPP) between Mainland China and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region

“…4.2.1 Mean score ranking technique Chan et al (2010) adopted the 'mean score' method to establish the relative importance of the perceived benefits of the Pay for Safety Scheme (PFSS) in Hong Kong as advocated by the clients and contractors. The data collected from the current questionnaire survey was also analyzed using the same technique, within various groups being categorized according to the origins of the respondents (i.e., mainland China and Hong Kong).…”

On-line reverse auctions in construction industry

“…In this context, it should be noted that due to their essence, electronic surveys are typical for their relatively low response rate that oscillates around 10 % [29]. From the perspective of sample size, 102 respondents can be considered as a sufficiently large sample as similar studies involved lower (36 [28]; 29 [30]) or slightly higher (145, [31]) number of respondents. The presented survey cannot be considered as statistically significant.…”

Potential difficulties in applying the Pay for Safety Scheme (PFSS) in construction projects

“…Safety awareness is found to be an influential factor of safety performance (Chan et al, 2005). More descriptions of the development and application of PFSS in both the public sector and private sector of Hong Kong can be found from Chan et al (2010).…”

“…The data variables analyzed by the Mann-Whitney U test must at least be on the ordinal level of measurement (Siegel and Castellan, 1988;Abdel-Kader and Dugdale, 2001;Love et al, 2004). A more detailed explanation on each statistical technique can be referred to Chan et al (2010 …”

“…The other part of the research project on the perceived benefits of PFSS has been published in the October 2010 Issue of the Journal of Safety Research (Chan et al, 2010). Special gratitude is also given to those industrial practitioners for their kind co-operation and generous contributions in completing the empirical survey questionnaires used in this study from March to May of 2009.…”