Construction Safety Consulting Editing and Proofreading Services

Seven men are standing in the rain at ten past seven. The supervisor has a document, and the briefing takes four minutes, and what happens on that job for the rest of the day depends on whether the document contains the three things that could actually hurt them or forty-one generic hazards including slips, trips and falls. Most risk assessments are written to survive an audit. The good ones are written to be read aloud.

We edit what safety consultants and contractors produce — risk assessments and method statements, task briefings and point-of-work risk assessment forms, construction phase plans and pre-construction information, permit to work documentation, safe systems of work for specific activities, toolbox talk and briefing material, accident and near miss investigation reports, site rules and induction material, competence and training records, emergency and rescue plans, and audit and inspection reporting. Our editors work on the document that gets briefed in four minutes at the start of a shift.

The risk assessment and method statement is either a live document or a filing exercise, and the difference is visible in a single test: could the supervisor brief it without reading it out? We work through these so the assessment opens with the small number of things that could kill or seriously injure on this task, at this location, today, since a document listing forty-one hazards has ranked none of them and the reader ranks them by reading order; so each control is written as a physical action somebody performs, with who does it and when — not "ensure adequate edge protection" but who installs it, before which step, and who checks it; so the method is a sequence of steps in the order they happen, because a method statement organised by trade or by topic cannot be followed by anyone actually doing the work; so the stop conditions are stated, naming the wind speed, the weather, the missing person or the changed condition at which work halts and who has authority to halt it; so the generic content is separated from the task-specific content, given that a document in which the site-specific paragraph is buried on page nine will not be found; so rescue is planned rather than assumed, particularly for work at height and confined spaces; and so the briefing record captures what was actually discussed rather than a list of signatures. Documents written this way change what happens at ten past seven.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including assessments, investigations and client information. We are editors rather than safety practitioners, and we offer no view on hazards, controls or compliance. What we can do is make the document usable by the person briefing it in the rain.