The following is a conversation that was presented in a panel format during the National Safety Council’s Global Congress in Orlando, FL.
QUESTION 1: Fatal Verses Non-Fatal Injuries – For the past 30 years and for a variety of reasons, we have seen a major decrease in the total number of recordable injury rate among workers. Beginning in 1992 from a 9 to present day slightly above a 2. But if you overly that trend with the fatality rate, the numbers are not as impressive. In fact, the number of workers killed in on the job accidents has plateaued from a statistical standpoint. We kill the same number of workers, year after year and in recent date we saw an 8.9% increase.
Given the statistical improvements in total recordable injury rates, should companies consider moving away from the historical lagging metric of TRIR to a program that focuses on Serious Injuries and Fatalities?
It depends.
What do I mean? If a move from TRIR to SIF and PSIF approach represents the next step towards a more comprehensive and holistic safety management system, where we are refining our focus, if you will, while at the same time not taking our eyes off all the other areas, then I think companies should incorporate this approach into their overall strategy. If, however, the move to SIF and PSIF approach is viewed as more of a final destination – one of those “we finally found the magic bullet that will solve our problems” – then all we are doing is trading one lagging indicator for another.
I bring all this up because there is a wide range of understanding of safety around the globe today. So organizational maturity matters. Some are fully engaged and constantly trying to push the boundaries, which is by the way part of my book title, and others are just checking it off like another task. It is the latter ones that I am thinking about when we engage the subject of SIFs and PSIFs because my fear is that they will switch their attention from one set of hazards that led to recordables to another set that leads to SIFs, and we’re going to inadvertently create a whole new category of incidents and ways to hurt our people.
QUESTION 2: What is a Serious Injury? Based on conversations that I have had with fellow safety professionals across various industries, many companies are launching SIF and PSIF prevention programs. In fact, looking at the agendas of ASSP’s recent PDC, the breakout sessions here at the NSC Congress and BCSP’s Global Summit, there were no less than twenty-four sessions focusing on SIFs and PSIFs. The state of California has even established regulatory requirements for reporting potential SIFS. While we all understand that a fatality is, what I have discovered is that there is no common definition of what a serious injury is.
Serious, according to OSHA, obviously is an amputation, loss of an eye, or hospitalization. Construction Safety Research Alliance folks out of Bolder, CO say it should be tied to life, as in is life-ending, life-threatening, or life-altering. At the same time, serious is somewhat subjective to at least an individual and job family, perhaps an industry too.
At the worker level, our default at defining serious is going to be by looking at one’s job description and aligning our definition at how the injury impacts someone’s ability to do their job. That is actually been one of the problems with our whole approach to safety as work-related only. But I digress. The point is what an employer may not consider as serious because someone can keep doing their job, may be considered as serious by the individual, their family, etc. So, that’s one of the challenges with a definition. On job family level, losing a fingertip may not be considered serious in oil and gas because the employee can still perform his work functions but it may be considered as serious in healthcare, because loss of sensitivity is impacting brain surgeon’s ability to do her job.
And then you’d have to consider what serious means within different industries. Theoretically, serious in oil and gas, which has 7x the fatality rates of other industries, would be caused by driving, struck by, falls and exposures. Serious in data centers are caused by electricity. Construction throws a curveball, at least according to the numerous recent studies showing that you’re 7x more likely to die of suicide, surprisingly, than any other hazard.
QUESTION 3: Professional Safety Journal, the flagship publication of the American Society of Safety Professionals, published an article by the researchers at the Construction Safety Research Alliance at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The article was entitled, “What is a Serious Injury?: A model for defining serious injuries.” Before I read the article, I did not understand all the complexities of determining if an injury is serious or not. I would like to provide each of you with a scenario that was contained in the article and ask each of you for your response as to whether this incident meets the definition of serious. A worker lost the tip of his finger when unstable materials unexpectedly shifted in the bed of a truck. The injury involves bone damage, and the piece of the finger cannot be reattached. Simply stated, the consequences of this injury will be permanent but there is technically no disablement because the functionality of the finger will not be affected. How would you classify this injury?
As I already mentioned above, it depends.
What is the worker’s job?
What industry?
Are we considering the potential psychological impacts of the injury on the worker and worker’s family?
Is the injury going to impact the worker’s career growth?
Some may argue that not all the questions I asked here are relevant and perhaps so. But the point is that we have to push the boundaries of our traditional and narrow understanding of safety if we are really interested in saving lives, and if we are really interested in advancing our profession to the next evolution.
QUESTION 4: By moving away from the TRIR as a determiner, which I believe is discriminatory to smaller companies and not predictive of future, to a SIF/PSIF model only what are the potential unintended consequences?
Some of this I already addressed above, but here are the quick bullet points/questions:
- It is discriminatory to smaller companies – how do we make things more fair for them?
- If a lagging indicator, like TRIR, is not predictive of future, who is to say that another lagging indicator, like SIF, will be?
- Concerns have been raised about TRIR not being statistically stable or valid because it is not based on sufficient volumes of consistent data. Research shows that for your company’s TRIR to carry statistical meaning, you will have to accumulate a billion plus worker hours. In fact, Hallowell did an evaluation in 2021 of more than 3 trillion worker hours and found that the occurrence of recordable injures is almost entirely random. I say all this to say that focusing on SIFs will yield a a whole lot less data points, so less chance of statistical validity.
- This brings me to another unintended consequence – ability to learn and share lessons learned. Because our serious injuries are more rare than recordable injuries, we will have harder time accumulating sufficient data, trending it, and coming up with lessons learned. This means we’ll have to open up and share our data across organizations, so we’ll see how that shapes up. Although some organizations have attempted to re-evaluate their existing incident data with a SIF/PSIF filter if you will, and expand their SIF databases in this way.
- I can keep going but here’s the last one that comes to mind – there will be a real temptation to shift focus to only those hazards, near misses, and injuries that are serious, and create blinders in the process to other areas
QUESTION 5: How do we make the definition clear so that it can be consistently applied? The authors of the article recommend developing a uniform definition based on the “LIFE Model.” In that model an injury is classified as a SIF or PSIF if it results in the following outcomes: Life Ending, Life Threatening, or Life Altering. What say you?
I think we’ll have to first decide how comprehensive and holistic we want to be. Is our definition going to cover work-related considerations and consequences only? Is it going to include the impact outside of work? Is it going to extend to the career potential impact? Is is going to include potential emotional and psychological impacts? How do we gather data from the on-the-fly adjustments made by our personnel in work as performed vs work as imagined and how do we allow that data to inform the definition? Should we consider incorporating AI and machine learning to find the common denominators in incidents and flag projects with a similar set of conditions and factors, the way AECOM is doing it? Once we address these preliminary questions, we can move to aligning on definition.
