CareHomeDeskCareHomeDeskThe Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 and the duties they impose on care home clients.
The Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 apply to virtually all construction work, including maintenance and refurbishment projects. A care home commissioning any building works is a 'client' under CDM -- and clients have specific legal duties under the regulations, regardless of the size of the project.
As a CDM client, the care home is required to: make suitable arrangements for managing the project (including health and safety), ensure that other duty holders are appointed and have the skills, knowledge and experience appropriate to the project, ensure that the pre-construction information package is assembled and provided to designers and contractors, and ensure that a health and safety file is produced at completion of the project.
Where a project is 'notifiable' -- more than 30 working days with more than 20 workers simultaneously, or more than 500 person-days -- a Principal Designer and Principal Contractor must be formally appointed, and HSE must be notified using the F10 online notification. For most routine care home projects, this threshold is not reached -- but for major refurbishments or new-build extensions, it may be.
At the end of a project, the contractor must provide a health and safety file containing as-built drawings, specifications, materials and maintenance data, and health and safety information for future maintenance. This file is a CDM deliverable and must be retained for the life of the building. It should be stored with the other compliance documents (EICR, asbestos register etc.) and made available to any future contractor working on the building.
CareHomeDesk gives you compliance checklists, maintenance logs, and contractor management tools built around exactly this kind of knowledge.