Is focusing on LTIFR and TRIFR a case of fiddling on the trivial, over the use of effective practices and measures?
One key influence in my career was the late Geoff McDonald. I’ve covered his work before, and here’s another from 1995 arguing how use of injury frequency rates is obscene – a loathsome or corrupting activity.
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First, injury results from an exchange of damaging energy.
Damage falls into three groups (see image 1):
· Class I – a person’s life is permanently altered
· Class II – temporarily altered
· Class III – inconvenienced
Based on earlier Aussie data, 87% of occurrences were Class II and gave 18% of costs, yet 13% of occurrences were Class I and gave 82% of costs.
In Geoff’s words, “Class I damage occurs rarely, yet the cost is enormous”, not to mention the human cost.
Further, “Unless these Class I occurrences are directly confronted, safety is fiddling”, and safety is “fundamentally a Class I problem. Class I occurrences are not chance variation II or Class III”, and using Class IIIs to predict Class Is is like “using the occurrence of the common cold to predict cancer, heart attack or stroke”.
Image 2 shows how we can shift to Class I – in short, a focus on damaging energy exchanges over individual focus on behaviour and injury frequency rates.
Geoff argues that much organisational safety effort is “driven by” TRIFR etc. When these measures affect performance appraisals, pay rises or awarding of contracts etc, then “effort will be focused on this number and it will decrease, even to zero”. Hence, gaming.
Moreover, reducing LTIFRs are more about Class II occurrences, not Class Is, and the gymnastics employed to keep the number low is impressive.
“LTIFR is an invalid measure of safety performance”, and it is a “poor measure of Class II damage and does not reflect Potential Class I damage”. It’s unreliable because “both sides of the fence cheat like hell”.
Hence, “LTIFR cannot be tolerated by a community seriously interested in controlling work damage to people”.
Finally, “Most mishaps can never become major damage events”.
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