Joshua Moskowitz, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Honolulu District Safety and Occupational Health Specialist, and Jeremy McCranie, previous Honolulu District Safety & Occupational Health Manager, recently co-published a case study in the International Journal of Construction Management.
The article titled “Investigating the impact of army safety and occupational health management system implementation on safety performance indices: case study of a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers district” is the first of its kind to assess the impact of the Army Safety and Occupational Health Management System (ASOHMS).
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Safety and Occupational Health Management System (CE-SOHMS) is the USACE counterpart of ASOHMS.
“I originally became interested in the impacts of ASOHMS/CE-SOHMS while rotating through the District’s Safety Office as part of the Army Fellows Program,” said Moskowitz. “At the time, only three Districts had successfully implemented CE-SOHMS and there was still some uncertainty surrounding its usefulness to benefit safety outcomes in the workplace and USACE project sites.”
The study scientifically investigated any potential relationships between progress in implementing the system and accident rates among USACE employees and contractors.
Correlations discovered between implementation progress and contractor accident rates on USACE projects were completely unexpected and ended up becoming a major focus of the study.
“One thing is for certain,” said Moskowitz. “Future studies need to be conducted to assess if the same impacts are being seen across the USACE, the Army, and other DOD agencies. As part of continuous improvement, we will be aiming to further our research to identify causation and greater empirical evidence of this relationship.”
"This research contributes valuable insights to the USACE enterprise and broader safety community," said McCranie, chief, Safety & Occupational Health U.S. Army Engineering & Support Center Huntsville. "This reflection has become a reality and at the end of the day safety is about taking care of people and the proof is in the pudding,"
The article is available here:
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15623599.2025.2537722#abstract
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