As a safety officer, you have been paying attention to the trends in workplace safety over the last 20 to 30 years.

The good news in many areas is that overall incident and injury rates have been steadily dropping over this time, thanks to vigilant efforts by safety officers, C-suites across many industries, and better training of employees in safety protcols and better and more consistent accountabilities by workers in their own safety.

Knife Injury by Alex Thomson

[Image courtesy of Flickr user Alex Thomson via a Creative Commons license] The good news is that minor workplace injuries, such as this one, have become 50 percent less common than in the late 1990s; the bad news is that the odds of suffering a serious injury or death in a workplace incident has grown, based on research reported in a recent Professional Safety magazine article.

However, in the true sense of yin-and-yang balance in the universe, there is also some bad, or at least concerning news on the workplace safety front. While the overall number of incidents and injuries has dropped significantly, the reduction in the rate of what are called serious injuries and fatalities (SIFs) has dropped at a much slower rate in recent years, which seems to reveal that the ratio of SIFs to overall incident rate may actually be growing.

In other words, for all the work we are doing to reduce overall incidents, we’re actually increasing the odds that any single incident will involve a serious injury or fatality. We’re taking care of the minor incidents but not as much the major ones that lead to lost work time or even death.

That does lead to a couple of interesting questions: Why is this happening? What are the causes of these SIFs that our current safety protocols aren’t covering?

 

The Numbers

First of all, before we can begin to answer the questions, we have to at least look at the data that leads us to these questions. Donald Martin and Alison Black wrote an extensive article in the September 2015 issue of Professional Safety magazine titled “Preventing Serious Injuries & Fatalities,” which goes into great depth about the recent study of incident and injury reports in an extensive sampling across industries and delves into some of the root causes for SIFs and to shed some light on the discrepancy between the rate of reduction of incidents overal l and the much-slower rate reduction in SIFs.

Perhaps the starkest take in the numbers that Martin and Black reveal in their article is the reduction in SIFs and overall incident rates over the last 10 to 15 years, which is the basis for this article and the related study findings, which we will cover in future posts.

According to the best research of data, the rate of nonfatal injuries fell more than 50 percent over the past 15 years and more than a third just in the last 10 years. That sounds like great news right?

 

However, the death rate among workers in incidents has fallen but at a much slower pace – just half as fast in the past 15 years (25.5 percent) and about a third as fast over the last decade (12.5 percent) compared to the non-fatal injury rate.

In effect, this means that all of our safety protocols have done a great job minimizing incidents in general, but now it means that the incidents we do have on our worksites have a greater probability of involving serious injuries or deaths.

It’s one thing to keep workers from missing a day or two of work due to a sprained ankle or back spasms, but hospitalization or death still seems to be a reasonably likely destination for those who are involved in an incident nowadays.

Study Nuts and Bolts

To address the issue and perhaps gain some insight, Martin and Black wanted to consider only the single-fatality incidents that were reported by seven major corporations which recorded more than 1,000 incidents over two years that involved about 1 million people.  The goal of the research was to find if there were safety flaws in any of the single-fatality incidents that could lend some insight into possible changes or adaptations to existing protocols to help prevent these types of incidents. (Large-scale events that involved many fatalities were recommended for separate research, as these were believed to “bias” the current research due to their large numbers.)

Every piece of data available for every incident and injury – whether a mere first-aid report to death – was pored over in this research, and Marin and Black looked to drill down as deep as they could to find correlations that would be possible indicators of a SIF.

Next time, I will start to look into the results of the research so that we can all hope to gain a little clarity into this recurring problem – and especially as it seems the problem is getting a little worse, or at least, more prevalent as the number of actual incidents drops.