The Root Cause of SIFs: It might not be what you think it is

The number of serious injuries and fatalities (SIF) in the workplace over the last 30 years has decreased at a much lower rate than minor injuries. According to the Campbell Institute Serious Injury and Fatality Prevention: Perspectives and Practices white paper from 2018, review of Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that “the total recordable injury rate (TRIR) has dropped from about 8.5 recordable incidents per 200,000 working hours to less than 3.0 incidents per 200,000 hours in 2016” while the SIF trend has not shown any significant improvement. It is not uncommon for individual companies to have a great TRIR metric (very low or zero recordable injuries) to experience a SIF.

??????????????The topic of SIFs and how to prevent them has become of great interest to the safety community in both an academic and a practical sense. Much of the research on SIF prevention has focused mainly on fine-tuning the high-hazard risk assessment process and specific hazard prevention measures. Sophisticated and cumulative risk assessment methods have become the norm and the focus of prevention measures have become increasingly focused on measuring risk to help assess a situation specifically for SIF potential.

??????????????What is the root cause of SIFs? Is it really risk assessment with a laser focus on preventing high risk events? Or could the basis of SIF prevention lie somewhere as simple as the basic foundations of a safety management program – identification of hazards (as many of them as possible), compliance with regulations, implementation of industry best practices, good policies and procedures, and training? Do we already have the “blueprint” in our hands for the most primary element of preventing SIFs and instead of focusing on building and continuously improving our safety management systems, we have fallen into the trap of analyzing SIF potential into a standalone issue? I think we have.

The practice of safety is a systems-thinking science, and a robust safety management system is the most critical component to uncovering latent and system factors for both less-than-serious injuries and SIFs. Targeted or cumulative risk assessment must take a holistic approach with the end in mind (SIF prevention), but not without first laying the foundation for true integration of safety management system components throughout the organization. Safety management system weaknesses often go unnoticed until SIFs strike.

If you are passionate about lowering the SIF rate, then as a safety professional there are a few things that would serve you better than thinking up a new risk assessment method that magically prevents SIFs:

·???????Be mindful of the content of your organization’s policies and procedures and keep them up to date. The documentation used by workers to ensure that tasks are performed in the safest ways must be current to the task at hand and inclusive of the best practices of the industry.

·???????Recognize that hazard identification and risk assessment should be a constant state of practice in every aspect of the work performed. Paying focused attention to the conditions that surround hazards with SIF potential is the most effective when there is a diligent effort on hazard identification in all aspects of the work – even the tasks that seemingly are “low risk”.

·???????Ensure workers receive sustainable training on proper safety procedures, hazard identification, task accomplishment, and any relevant policies and procedures. Risk goes up when training goes down. Inadequately trained or untrained workers have the potential to associate strongly with higher rates of on-the-job injuries or SIFs. Ignorance is never bliss when it comes to safety on the job.

·???????Utilize all the tools at your disposal for continuous safety improvement. Tools such as accident investigation, near miss analysis, and root cause detection methods that promote the discovery of latent or previously unconsidered hazards for correction and control.

·???????Engage workers in the hazard identification process and provide them with the autonomy to speak up and help both initiate and implement safety improvements. Empowering more people to look deeper into the safety management system for flaws makes the entire system stronger and more stable, which in turn can prevent SIFs.

·???????Collect data on safety performance indicators (leading and lagging) and endeavor to track progress and identify areas for improvement as close as you can to real-time. Data collection and analysis components includes things like performing detailed accident investigations, tracking safety incident frequency, analyzing near miss events, monitoring safety Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and collaborating with internal and external stakeholders with observations and audits, to name a few.

·???????Stop focusing on TRIR as an adequate metric of safety performance – zero injuries do not mean that something more significant is less likely to happen. Heinrich theory of accident causation focuses on the worker and not the system, and as I alluded to earlier a good safety management system is the foundation of injury prevention.

·???????Acknowledge that the ever-evolving arsenal of risk assessment tools are useful but should never be used as quick fix methods for designing injury prevention programs. Sustainable safety improvement should always be in the forefront of our thought process when using risk assessment as a vehicle to SIF reduction.

·???????Audit your safety management system components regularly with purpose, commitment to improvement, and with both broad and focuses lenses. While the current trends in SIF prevention favor focused and often complex risk assessment methods, it is often useful to look in the most common places first for the root cause(s).

SIF prevention efforts should not be a standalone risk assessment or analysis process. If safety professionals want to lower SIFs, then the safety net of prevention must be carefully curated and meticulously monitored integrated safety management system approach. A successful SIF prevention process must incorporate any focused efforts to control SIF exposure into the fabric of the most basic and foundational elements of an organization’s safety management system.