Don’t Walk By: How we’re empowering our team to put health and safety first

‘Don’t Walk By’ brings together our policies, reporting tools, training, and communications under one clear message. The aim is to make health and safety a shared responsibility – whether on the factory floor or in the boardroom. 

The campaign empowers everyone at Thurston to act when they see a risk and speak up if they notice unsafe behaviours. By encouraging proactive reporting and intervention, we’re improving the quality of hazard identification and creating a safer workplace for all. 

Safety isn’t one person’s responsibility – it’s everyone’s. By taking action together, we can create a safer workplace for all. 

Whatever your requirements, big or small, modular construction can quickly provide essential facilities like intensive care units and triage centres, future-proofed for further expansion if needed, and fully fitted out at handover, for immediate use.

At Thurston, safety always comes first. We don’t wait for accidents to happen; we actively identify hazards and put the right controls in place before they cause harm. 

This proactive approach runs through everything we do. From investing early in higher fire safety standards, to delivering regular training that helps our team recognize risks like improper lifting, poor lighting, or unsafe material stacking, we make sure our colleagues have the knowledge and confidence to intervene. 

Keeping health and safety front of mind doesn’t just protect our people — it protects our projects. Fewer incidents mean fewer delays, minimising disruption, maintaining quality, and keeping delivery on schedule. We’re proactive in everything we do – including our investment last year into exceeding higher fire safety standards well before new regulations came into place. 

We also don’t just expect high safety standards from ourselves – we expect them from every partner we work with. Health and safety is non-negotiable, and by holding everyone to consistent standards, we build trust and ensure safe, high-quality delivery across every offsite modular construction project. 

To launch the campaign, we’ve created a short film featuring our team reading ‘I Chose to Look the Other Way’, a poem written by American training manager Don Merrell. 

The poem is a powerful reminder of the consequences of ignoring risks, reinforcing the central message of our campaign: health and safety is everyone’s responsibility.  

By sharing it in our own voices, we aim to spark conversations, inspire action and spread the message that together, we can create a safer workplace for all. 

View our video below: