Workplace Injuries: Harbingers of Things to Come

But if you have been paying attention to recent trends lately, you’ll find that a 75-year-old Triangle is a bit outdated and a little too simple.

Because what has been happening lately has been a bit of a mystery, but one that has been of high concern for many – the trend that while there are fewer incidents over the last 20 years, the risk of serious injuries and fatalites (SIFs) in each incident has actually increased.

A Recap

The last couple of posts I have written have been summaries of the highlights in an article about SIFs written by Donald Martin and Alison Black in the September 2015 issue of Professional Safety magazine, which noted the trend toward an increased risk of SIFs among worksite incidents and looked into finding possible root causes for these SIFs that an average incident may not have.

Why is this research important? Because the Heinrich Triangle is generally wrong- it has said that the fewer incidents you have, the fewer SIFs you will end up having. But the major flaw in the Triangle is that it has assumed the very same factors that go into all incidents also go into SIFs.

Turns out, that’s not entirely true. If it were the case, SIFs would have dropped an equal rate as al incidents over the last 10 years – instead of falling at one-third the rate.

The Research

Martin and Black took a look at six major corporations (100,000 employees each, on average) and assessed their incident reports over a two-year period and determined those which were minor and major and based on certain factors and contexts, whether each incident had high SIF potential or low SIF potential and grouped each according to their potential, not to the actual severity. Each group was then evaluated based on their circumstances, factors and possible causes of the incidents.

Whether looking at all the data quantitatively or qualitatively, similar results came out of each evaluation – the factors that go into a high-SIF potential incident are actually very different than what goes into any other incident.

SIF Precursors

What was actually found in a high-risk SIF incident (even if SIF doesn’t occur in the incident) were three distinct harbingers, or precursors, that all must be around the situation at the same time – not exclusively independent.

The perfect storm of factors that lead to a high-risk SIF incident are:

1. A high-risk situation;
2. the safety controls or protocols but fail, be absent or not be complied with; and
3. it must be unmitigated for a period of time.

This is probably the most important part – the third factor, the high-risk situation that has been left to continue for a period of time (though the amount of time is not determined). There were some minor incidents that had high SIF potential, but the worker was perhaps “lucky” that time. If that incident doesn’t raise flags and cause the safety professional(s) to address the situation and it is left to continue only because the incident was minor, the company just might be playing with fire.

This is part of why it is so important for safety professionals to do random spot inspections of the worksite to make sure that everyone is doing what they are supposed to do and to make sure all safety controls are in proper working order. And an officer should never let any situation go unchecked more than a couple or few days without an evaluation.

And it is also important to keep track of all your inspection and incident reports and pay special attention if it seems that one particular area seems to be a popular source for incidents or seems to be commonly not in proper safety compliance.

The New Prevention Paradigm

Now that we have an understanding of where SIF incidents can come from, we now have a new way to approach all incidents so that the SIF incidents can start to decrease at a level comparable to the decrease in all incident rates over the last couple decades. This new paradigm has seven components for us safety officers to understand:

1. Get out of the Heinrich Triangle. Stop thinking so much about reducing the number of all incidents, thinking that will eventually decrease all SIF risks. About one-fifth of all situations will have SIF risk, regardless of the number of incidents. Address the above-mentioned factors directly to mitigate the risk, not just the occurrence.
2. Separate injury outcomes by cause. OSH incident logs can be misleading – the same result will be logged as the same type of incident even if the causes are different (e.g., a back injury from slipping on ice is seen as the same as a back injury caused by a fall from a scaffolding 20 feet in the air, though each incident has different SIF risks). Knowing the context of the injury will shed some light on the areas that need to be addressed more earnestly.
3. Be aware of possible blindness. OSH logs are often a bit generic and vague about reporting incidents, so if you rely only on that for your information about SIF potential, you’re going to miss out on understanding where the risks are and to take the steps necessary to mitigate those risks. Make sure you get as much information as you can about any and all incidents.
4. Change the culture about SIFs. This usually involves education all the way through the organization, from educating about serious injuries, what an SIF potential might look like and perhaps even coming up with a numerical value to assess the risk each task may have (research showed that more than four in five high-risk SIF potential comes from workers just doing a routine task) .
5. The devil is truly in the details. All reports and investigations must be as detailed as possible. Don’t skate buy just on whatever safety regulations require for reporting. All details and context must be included so each incident can be fully evaluated for their SIF potential and a problem area can be addressed quickly before another incident occurs.
6. Ask questions and be observant. In a smaller sample of SIF and SIF-potential cases, simple interviews and observations of various situations could have prevented these incidents nearly 90 percent of the time. So observe your workers and their work, and be forthright in asking questions when conducting observations or evaluations.
7. SIFs don’t just happen. As mentioned before, SIFs come from situations that are high-risk and go unmitigated for an extended period, so no one should ever act surprised if and when a SIF happens or should phrase any such incident as a “freak accident” or similar. These things are preventable, so instead of being confused, people should feel empowered to prevent them and angry if it happens and take steps to correct the issue so it does not happen again.

If we all take on SIFs or SIF-potential as a different animal than any average everyday incident, then it’s likely we will get a hold on these incidents and mitigate them much at the same rate as we have done with other minor incidents over the years. It will involve more work and more detail than what is expected on a OSH report or a standard observation form. It will take passion for safety, a genuine care for workers and for the productivity of the company. Do you have what it takes?