There has certainly been cause for concern among safety officers lately that incidents on the worksite seem to have increasing odds of inducing serious injuries or fatalities compared to incidents 10 to 15 to 20 years ago.
Safety officers were under a lot of pressure and stress to try to minimize the incidents in the workplace, because we all seemed to know that every incident had a potential to cost the company money and make the workplace seem unsafe. But thanks to the hard work of all our fellow safety officers around the world, the incident rate has been steadily dropping over the last two decades.
[Image courtesy of Flickr user Alex Thomson via a Creative Commons license] The good news is that minor workplace incidents, such as cutting a thumb with a kitchen knife, have generally dropped over the last 20 years. The bad news is that major incidents have not dropped as fast. Why? A recent article seems to shed some light.
In other words, we seem to be doing a great job of lessening the number of overall incidents, but the ratio of serious-injury-and-fatality (SIF) incidents to overall incidents is not falling nearly as fast. In fact, over the last 10 years, research has shown that the rate of SIF incidents has declined only one-third as fast as the overall incident rate (about 12.5 percent versus a nearly 35-percent drop overall).
So while there are fewer incidents in general, there is a higher risk of incidents being major and serious. Donald Martin and Alison Black certainly took notice of this trend, and they wrote about it in the September 2015 issue of Professional Safety magazine, looking deeper into some recent research to try to find out why we seem to be not doing as good a job minimizing serious incidents like we have all incidents in general?
Why do we seem to be working around the edges of incidents? Why are we not getting right to the heart of what really costs our companies serious money? Are we doing something wrong as safety officers, or are we missing something in our work?
Or is it simply what the workers are doing or not doing in terms of safety compliance? Black and Martin looked into these efforts with their recent article.
Which brings us to Heinrich.
Heinrich is Generally Right
More than 70 years ago, a researcher named Heinrich developed the Heinrich Triangle to explain his idea that less-serious injuries are more common than the serious injuries or fatalities. While in come circles of safety this has been considered common sense, much of the research has confirmed Heinrich’s general assertions but had been critical of his specific ratio.
However, what also came out of the research was a “woulda, coulda” dynamic. Martin and Black looked deeper into the incident reports submitted by the sample organizations (six of them, major corporations, submitted data involving more than 1,000 incidents over a two-year period) and found that about one in five so-called “minor” incidents actually had a reasonable level of serious-injury-and-fatality (SIF) risk.
What this means is that as Martin and Black looked into the contexts of all of these “minor” incidents, and they found actual serious injuries in the incidents, or environments where these companies were “lucky” that these incidents were minor this time, but they may not be if the conditions were repeated in the future.
This was based on a logical methodology that determined circumstances surrounding each incident and whether it was reasonable to believe that a SIF could or would have happened in each incident. Taken this a step further, exactly 21 percent of all incidents in the study wre deemed to have SIF risk of greater than 90 percent (which means that if it was a “minor” incident, one in five of them were actually facing a 90-percent chance of being a serious incident, meaning they defied logical and reasonable odds).
Where Heinrich Fails
The Heinrich Triangle was a nice concept from which much was built upon in terms of safety, but there is one area in particular where it fails, and that is in proportionality of SIFs to overall incident rates. The Triangle basically went on the belief that if you lowered the number of incidents (the bottom, or foundation of the triangle), the fewer SIFs that would occur.
However, based on the analysis of the incidents reported in the study, the low proportion of SIF risk meant that lessening the frequency of incidents in general would not necessarily reduce the risk for a SIF in proportion. In other words, Heinrich’s Triangle would get narrower at the bottom and not get smaller on all sides in proportion as Heinrich first postulated.
In Marin and Black’s assessment of the incident data, it seemed that general percentage of minor incidents with SIF potential were specific according to the organization and location, considering the percentages varied from as little as 10 percent of all incidents reported to as many as 36 percent.
So Why is Heinrich Wrong?
The Heinrich Triangle seemed to be based solely on a quantitative function; that is, the number of incidents reduces means an equal reduction in major incidents that result in SIFs.
In a base, logical sense, that would seem to fly. But in Martin and Black’s research, what was found was that Heinrich went on the presumption that all incidents, regardless of severity, have the same contributing factors. But in reality, what contributes to a minor incident is much different than those factors that contribute to a SIF.
And that, friends, is what is called a tease for my next post. Happy American Thanksgiving, all!