Descriptive Statistical Analysis of OSHPD Quality Inspections on California Hospital Projects

California hospital construction projects are large, complex, and extremely difficult projects to execute and navigate successfully. One of the primary reasons for this is the OSHPD permit, review, and inspection process. The quality control rigor imposed by this third party inspection procedure has caused great angst amongst most general contractors and subcontractors. This study examined over 60,000 OSHPD inspections, spanning six California hospital projects and forty-one separate subcontractors. Specifically, this paper conducts descriptive statistical analysis on the total number of inspections conducted and the percentage of failed inspections (or re-inspections) that occurred. The analysis, conducted on major subcontractors working on significant California hospital construction projects, revealed that on average nearly 1500 inspections per subcontractor per project were conducted with an average overall re-inspection or failure rate of just over 9%. This is a directly measurable input to the cost of quality or rework. Benchmarking analysis was also conducted revealing that for all major subcontractors a best inspection failure performance of 2.02% was achieved and worst of 21.82% was observed. These kind of statistics are noteworthy as they are measurable data which could be applied to future projects and assist in decreasing inspection failures and the cost of quality.