Risk Assessment for Serious Injuries & Fatalities

Yesterday's post highlighted the work of Mercer ORC's Fatality and Serious Injury Prevention task force. Here's a summary of the six steps in its new risk assessment model for serious injuries and fatalities.

1. Assess the current situation and set the stage for the technical and cultural shift needed to prevent serious injuries and fatalities (SIFs). The group is developing a safety cultural assessment tool to assess the value of safety as demonstrated by safety leadership, employee engagement and empowerment, supervisory support, risk tolerance, recognition/reporting of serious hazards, and availability of tools to limit exposure to serious hazards. 
2. Identify and inventory situations that are potential precursors to SIFs. The task force noted that current measures create a blind spot for serious injury prevention, and research by the RAND Corp. found no correlation between OSHA data and SIF prevention. So, companies must examine their own data and create an inventory of serious hazards and underlying conditions that could activate or intensify hazards, including human factors and organizational deficiencies. To address this need, the group is developing a new that companies can use to inventory precursor situations. 
3. Conduct risk assessments and set priorities for intervention. The biggest difference here, the group explained, it taking control of the probability part of the risk equation. Failure to accurately judge probability can lead to serious consequences—and many times fewer controls are in place than may be perceived. Using the group’s soon-to-be posted risk assessment worksheet for SIFs, precursors can be evaluated on potential severity, degree of current control and number of workers exposed to provide a truer assessment of probability. 
4. Ensure adequate hazard control. Current trends suggest that decision makers are incorrectly applying the hierarchy of control, often relying on lower-order controls. Leaders need to better understand how this affects injury outcomes. One recommended resource is Leadership Matters: Managing Fatal Risk, a guidance document from International Council on Mining and Metals. The task force is developing a selection table that will help the user select various controls across the hierarchy. 
5. Address related organizational deficiencies and human factors elements. This will involve improved learning from past incidents and a better understanding of human error. Currently, there is a basic misunderstanding of human error fueled by flawed investigations that overlook organizational factors which cause those errors. The task force emphasized the use of checklists as a way to ensure that critical steps are not overlooked. 
6. Ensure the infrastructure needed to drive continuous improvement is in place. To eliminate SIFs, leadership must view safety as a critical element of business performance. Safety and health management systems must focus on risk discovery and incident potential consequences; encourage a questioning culture; develop new metrics beyond lagging metrics; mine data for SIF precursors; and focus on higher-risk activities/operations.

Several years in the making, the group plans to have a selection of tools based on the model and related information available by Jan. 1, 2013, at www.saveworkerlives.org.