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.

JSHER Now Available on EBSCO

The Academics Practice Specialty’s (APS) biannual Journal of Safety, Health & Environmental Research (JSHER) is now available on EBSCO. More than 90% of libraries subscribe to an EBSCOhost database and APS felt it was a great opportunity to promote readership and further disseminate important SH&E research. Click here for the most recent JSHER issue or visit www.asse.org/academicsjournal for more information.

NHTSA Alerts Public to Dangers of Counterfeit Air Bags

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has issued a safety alert for consumers about the dangers of counterfeit air bags. The agency reports that these faulty air bags have been sold for use as replacement parts in vehicles that have been in a crash. NHTSA says these air bags look almost identical to original certified bags, but after testing, the counterfeits "showed  consistent malfunctioning ranging from nondeployment of the air bag to the expulsion of metal shrapnel during deployment."

NHSTA urges those whose vehicles have been in a crash and have had their air bags replaced by a repair shop (that is not part of a new car dealership) within the past 3 years, to contact a call center to have their vehicle inspected.

In addition, NHSTA also provides consumers with a list of vehicles that it knows has counterfeit air bags available.

Steps to Improving Safety Committees

Every company should consider five critical components when building a strong safety committee, says Al Polito in a recent issue of DureNews.

1. Right Size. Companies with more than 20 employees should have at least four committee members. In a company with several departments, a representative from each one should be on the committee.
2. Executive Buy-In. The committee must have authority to enact action plans that involve expenditures, as well as direct accountability for responsible parties.
3. Meeting Structure. Committees should meet monthly and in person, if possible. Start meetings on time and follow an agenda.
4. Information Management. Track all information related to workplace safety. Keep a spreadsheet of known safety issues and classify these issues to customers, employee injuries, ergonomic injuries, etc. Detailed minutes must also be recorded for every meeting and posted where all employees have access to them.
5. Hazard Identification and Evaluation. Conduct a quarterly workplace safety and health inspection in the form of a facility-wide walk-through. A system must be in place for any employee to easily report a hazard, as well as a formal process for investigating, analyzing and evaluating all reported hazards, incidents and near-incidents.

In addition, Polito says that by incorporating fun into workplace safety, employees will be more likely to participate. Promoting employee safety via educational programs, brown-bag lunches, guest speakers and participation in EHS fairs are all fun ways to expand awareness and keep safety interesting, he adds. 

Are You Ready for Some . . . New Concepts & Tools in Preventing Serious Injuries & Fatalities?

This week’s Fatality Prevention Forum featured on update on the progress of Mercer ORC’s Fatality and Serious Injury Prevention task force. Presenters included Steve Newell and Dee Woodhull, Mercer ORC HSE Networks; Ray Comingore and Glenn Murray, Exxon Mobil; and David Jacobi, Kimberly Clark.

One slide during the presentation featured this insightful quote from Albert Einstein: “We can’t solve problems using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” It speaks to several pillars of safety that, according to the task force, may be myths, particularly when it comes to preventing serious injuries:

1. Mistaken belief in Heinrich’s triangle that focuses on the bottom (recordable/lost-time incidents) takes care of top (serious injuries/fatalities). 
2. Misuse of OSHA data as the primary metric for driving and assessing safety performance. 
3. Overemphasis on history-based probability estimates when determining likelihood in conducting risk assessments that relate to high-gravity hazards. 
4. Failure to effectively argue against the mistaken belief that higher-level controls are generally cost prohibitive. 
5. Incorrect assumption that most injuries are caused by unsafe acts (fueled and reinforced by flawed incident investigations). 

So, how can SH&E professionals overcome these myths? The group is developing a new risk model that creates a separate track for addressing serious hazards. The group is careful to note that this new model doesn’t require what currently works. Instead, the new model can integrated into ongoing SH&E strategies. Look for more details on that tomorrow.

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.