Preventing Serious Injuries & Fatalities

In the past five years, BLS data show that worker fatalities are level or increasing year to year, as are serious injuries. Seven global companies supported by Mercer ORC Networks and BST pooled their data to study this trend, identify its sources and recommend strategies to prevent serious injuries and fatalities (SIF). Here are four key tips that BST’s Tom Krause shared during ASSE’s Safety 2012 conference in Denver.

1. Educate the organization on the prevention of SIFs. Everyone at all levels of the organization must be aware and alert to the fact that managing OSHA recordables is not enough. The company is still vulnerable to SIF exposures.
2. Institutionalize the concept of an SIF rate. This rate is the number of serious and fatal injuries—and recordable injuries with reasonable potential to be an SIF—divided by hours worked. Data on the SIF rate should be gathered for the past 2 to 3 years and from that point forward. The rate must have high visibility throughout the organization.
3. Embed findings from SIF assessments into existing safety systems, including pretask risk assessment, observation and feedback, and incident investigation, so these systems now address SIF precursors. Enhance your incident investigation and root cause analysis protocols. Go beyond obvious errors to find latent conditions that may represent precursors.
4. Develop mechanisms to identify and mitigate SIF precursors using long-term strategies, such as longitudinal analysis (some precursors do not surface as significant without data analysis over time), predictive analysis (capturing relationships among many factors to assess the risk or potential risk of a particular situation or activity) and discovery conversations.