Statistics ill-health

The HSE s experience is that organizations find health and safety performance measurement a difficult subject. They struggle to develop health and safety performance measures which are not based solely on injury and ill-health statistics. 

Yet, if senior managers are asked how they measure their companies health and safety performance, It is likely that the only measure would be accident or Injury statistics. While the general business performance of an organization is subject to a range of positive measures, for health and safety it too often comes down to one negative measure, injury and ill-health statistics -measures of failures. 

There are some significant problems with the use of injury/ill-health statistics in isolation ... 

Organisations that relying solely upon incident, injury/ ill-health statistics for their monitoring and measurement of their management system, particularly in relation to fire, are only able to measure management system failures. Crucially due to human nature, there may be underreporting of incidents and accidents for numerous reasons, which have been discussed in Chapter 4. 

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