Incident Tracking and Workplace Fatalities

Serious injuries and fatalities (SIFs) occurring at the workplace have become a significant focus in the field of safety. Over the past 20 years, the United States has seen a steady decline in overall recordable incident rates. However, the rate of SIFs, separate from other incidents, has remained fairly stable.

This troubling trend has led safety professionals to call for a paradigm shift in safety practices and direct their efforts to the prevention of these life-threatening and/or life-altering events.

ISN customers across a variety of industries have also shifted their attention to SIF and potential SIF (pSIF) reduction and prevention. This initiative is met with challenges, including varying definitions on the SIF term and difficulty in capturing consistent incident data.

How to Define a SIF
As there is no universal definition on what constitutes a serious injury across all industries, ISN uses OSHA’s definition, asking contractors to report any incidents that resulted in the below:

• Loss of an eye
• Amputation - The traumatic loss of all or part of a limb or other external body part, including fingertip amputations with or without bone loss; medical amputations resulting from irreparable damage; and amputations of body parts that have since been reattached.
• In-patient Hospitalization - Formal admission to the in-patient service of a hospital or clinic for care or treatment. (Treatment in an Emergency Room only is not reportable.)

Importance of SIF Data
A report from The National Safety Council’s Campbell Institute emphasizes that data collection and analysis are crucial to developing SIF prevention strategies. The analysis of past incidents can shed light on risks that an organization faces and provide direction on where it can take action to mitigate the risk of SIFs moving forward.

Leading Indicators for SIFs
Safety professionals acknowledge the importance of leading indicators to enable their organizations to identify and correct gaps before they turn into incidents, including SIFs. Evaluating these leading indicators and putting safe guards into place can help mitigate future SIFs and potential SIF (pSIF) events.

Information on safety culture and employee perceptions at an organization are key leading indicators for SIFs. In a survey conducted by ISN, 75% of the surveyed Hiring Clients believe improving safety culture and value alignment is an effective approach to reducing SIFs.

Monarch, ISN’s consulting arm, developed CultureSight, a safety culture study that enables ISN Customers to survey both their employees and contractor workers to gather perceptions of safety culture. The perceptions gathered include how likely SIFs are perceived to occur. Direct feedback is collected from those who perceive these events as likely to occur. This feedback can help identify organizational risks employees and contractors are seeing and can be incorporated into SIF prevention strategies moving forward.

Risk Assessments for SIF Prevention
Organizations should also analyze risk assessments to help prevent SIFs. Each gap in a risk assessment is an opportunity to improve and identify the status of your organization’s safeguards in these areas. You can determine the cause of incidents by highlighting safeguard failures and putting measures in place to mitigate SIF and pSIF events moving forward.

A risk assessment analysis can also be applied to look further into the characteristics of events that can often result in violations and fines at an organization.

Over the past several years, for example, one of the most frequent standards cited by OSHA was Fall Protection. OSHA has a long history of focusing on fall protection issues and citing U.S. companies for violations. Employers bear a substantial amount of responsibility for providing and maintaining adequate fall protection for employees. It is also important to ensure trained and competent employees continuously inspect and monitor all fall protection and prevention equipment and systems before use.

Resources for Actionable Risk Mitigation Strategies
ISN Hiring Clients and contractors can use ISN publications and data available in the contractor management platform ISNetworld to bring awareness to and assist in the development of actionable strategies that mitigate the risk of serious injuries and workplace fatalities.

ISN leveraged data available in ISNetworld and new technology to analyze recordable incidents that occurred at contractor companies in 2017, 2018, and 2019. The resulting publication, Serious Injury and Fatality Insights – An Analysis of 55,000+ Recordable Incidents, shares potential trends and insights that can be used to enhance SIF prevention and elimination in organizations. Request a copy of the publication.

Let ISN Help
While SIFs have moved to the forefront of many organization’s priorities, there is still much to be explored when it comes to prevention and elimination.

If you’re a current ISN Hiring Client, speak with your ISN team about how your organization’s contractor management program and contractor performance align with your industry peers.

If you’re a Hiring Client and interested to learn how a partnership with ISN could support your contractor management and risk mitigation efforts at your organization, request a demo of our ISNetworld platform.