Since the second half of last year, Fundación Laboral de la Construcción has been working on two projects on occupational safety in road conservation and maintenance work (COEX), whose common objective is to create materials and components that help in the correct management of occupational risk prevention in this type of work, indicating how to plan appropriate measures before work begins on these works, with special emphasis on the signalling tasks, which represent the greatest risk for workers.

There is a high rate of accidents at work associated with work carried out in road maintenance and operation activities, mainly as a result of accidents due to collisions. The workers who carry out tasks on these sites are continually exposed to the risk of being run over, especially in signalling and warning signs.

In addition to preventive recommendations, both projects also aim to raise awareness about the risks derived from these road conservation and maintenance works, in order to collaborate in the reduction of accidents derived from them, as well as for the dissemination of rules, good practices and safe working procedures.

VRoad, road training in the European construction industry, through virtual reality

Since last year, Fundación Laboral is coordinating -and will do so until 2020- the European project "VRoad", for virtual reality applied to road training in the European construction industry.  It is a project belonging to the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union, with the participation of four other partners: GA Consultores (Spain), Formedil Piemonte (Italy), Cenfic (Portugal), and BTP CFA Indre-et-Loire (France).

"VRoad" is proposed to solve the specific needs of training on the job and risk prevention in road training, through the development, testing and implementation of a training system based on Virtual Reality (VR), with scenarios that simulate real experiences.

In this way, the project partners want to reach four key points:

• Define a theoretical and practical learning framework for the development of the proposed training system, in order to meet the pedagogical and health and safety objectives, making sure that the technological tool is appropriate and complementary to the current training framework.
• Propose an innovative educational approach for the practical learning of road maintenance works through the development, testing and implementation of three activities/site situations through VR.
• Provide the management and complement both the trainers and the Vocational Training (VT) students in the use of the developed training system.
• Design a roadmap setting out the standards and steps necessary to recognise the content of the proposed training system, developed in terms of EQF (European Qualification Framework) and in accordance with the European framework and the recommendations of EQAVET (European Quality Assurance in Vocational Education and Training).

In support of these challenges, the project will also have a double objective: creating National Advisory Groups in each country of the consortium, as well as Technical Advisory Groups and implementing the standard recognition process.

The work methodology will combine qualitative techniques (key informant groups) and quantitative techniques (questionnaires and internet surveys), to obtain first-hand information on health and safety in civil works and, in particular, in road maintenance work.