Rates, accident/incident trend

Managers will normally take comfort if in general the accident/incident rates are in ratios that would normally be expected, there are few serious injuries and the rate of injuries maintains a downward trend - as would reports from employees highlighting fire safety issues, making a positive contribution to the management of fire risk in the workplace. 

Statistical information on past accidents and sickness may identify unsatisfactory trends in operating procedures which can be eliminated at the design stage of safe systems of work. The use of accident statistics and rates, e.g. accident incidence rate, as a sole measure of safety performance is not recommended, however, due to the variable levels of accident reporting in work situations. Under-reporting of accidents, common in many organisations, can result in inaccurate comparisons being made between one location and another. 

Various forms of accident data are collected by organisations and a number of standards indices are used, e.g. rates of accident incidence, frequency, severity and duration. Accident data are based on information compiled from accident reports. As such, they are a reactive form of safety monitoring and should not, of course, be used as the sole means of measuring safety performance. However, they do indicate trends in accident experience and provide feedback which can be incorporated in future accident prevention strategies. The following rates are used ... 

Once the challenge of locating accurate and complete records is met, the task of trend determination can begin. One of these key trends might be the accident incidence rate both for lost workday and recordable incidents. Another key trend that could probably be determined is the Experience Modification Rate (EMR). One should be able to obtain this number from the workers compensation carrier. The workers compensation carrier probably has already made a determination of which claims the most money has been expended on, which claims included the most days away from work, which parts of the body were affected most of the time, and so on. Getting information from the workers compensation carrier can be another good source of information. 

An obvious response to the problem of uninformed customers making incorrect decisions is to mount a public-information campaign. In general, all the public needs to know are historical data on the accident performance, or safety outputy of individual railroads. Much of this information is already available. The FRA s Accident / Incident Bulletin for a calendar year is available with a delay of about nine months. Midyear data are available with a delay of a couple of month. The information is available in hardcopy and on the FRA s World Wide Web site. An interested customer can quite quickly obtain information on the rate of collisions and derailments for the largest Class I and II railroads, and can observe recent trends in these rates for individual railroads. 

With these activity-based performance measures, there is also a variety of safety metrics that can be used to assess program performance. As identified by OSHA in studies ofVPP organizations, OSHA injury incidence rates, lost work day rates, and workers compensation losses are a few safety metrics that have been correlated to the performance of the VPP criteria activities. These measures can easily be expanded to include unsafe behaviors, accident trends, and near misses. 

Health and safety differs from many areas measured by managers because improvement in performance means fewer outcomes from the measure (injuries or ill-health) rather than more. A low injury or ill-health rate trend over years is still no guarantee that risks are being controlled and that incidents will not happen in the future. This is particularly true in organizations where major hazards are present but there is a low probability of accidents. 

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