Quality and safety in the palestinian construction industry

Construction industry is one of the largest and most important industries in Palestine. Quality and safety in the industry still suffers from ignorance and lack of supervision and accident rate on construction projects is very high. The objective of this paper is to identify the quality and safety factors that relate to safety, and determine their relative importance as perceived by contractors to help reduction of accidents. A survey was conducted by using a 55 item questionnaire which was grouped into 15 major categories. Analysis of the responses found the most important factors that included: "safety organization formed with community culture considers safety is a vital need for people", "all managers are required to go through proper safety management training", "all engineers are needed to go through relevant safety management training", "lack of orientation training of new workers decreases quality and increases risks for them", and "safety organization formed in such a way that workers and top management exercise positive behavior towards safety". The results found that safety training group was categorized as the most important among the 15 categories.