What tells you more about tomorrow’s fatality risk – last month’s injury rate or today’s control of high-energy hazards?
An interesting study Arnaldo Bayona & Matthew Hallowell and colleagues exploring the relationship between assessments of pre-job safety brief (PJSB) quality and HECA (high-energy control assessments) and work conditions, and links with injury and SIFs.
Not a summary as the full article is uploaded under an open access licence.
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Extracts:
· They argue “serious injuries and fatalities (SIFs) are characterized as the outcomes resulting from uncontrolled high-energy releases (Manuele, 2005; Martin & Black, 2015; Hallowell et al., 2017), where existing barriers and task-specific work plans were either absent, inadequate, or transgressed”
· For metrics, they propose that leading indicators relate to “How safe WILL the job be?”, monitoring indicators relate to “How safe IS the job?”, and lagging indicators “How safe WAS the job?”
· PJSB quality is a leading indicator, HECA is monitoring, and long-term injury rates are lagging
· They found “a lower injury rate in the past is associated with stronger short-term safety performance in the future, as measured by more engaged pre-job safety briefs and reduced exposure to high-energy hazards”
· “PJSB quality is positively associated with the HECA score over short periods”
· “a higher HECA score is associated with reduced SIF rates over extended periods. These results indicate that monitoring key safety activities and indicators of energy control can serve as short-term measures of SIF exposure that predict future outcomes”
· “companies that conduct more structured and engaged pre-job safety briefs tend to have more Direct Controls in place”
· And “for every percent increase in pre-job quality, there was a 0.5% increase in HECA, holding worker hours constant”
· “There is an important association between historical injury rates and short-term safety performance, but in the opposite direction that some would expect. Findings showed that companies may respond to lower historical injury rates by improving their pre-job safety brief activities”
· And “for every additional OSHA recordable injury, companies experienced a 3.6% reduction in PJSB quality and a 3.7% reduction in HECA”
· “HECA is a strong predictor of high- severity injuries, including SIFs …. The results showed that the likelihood of serious and fatal injuries significantly decreased with improved levels of Direct Controls”
· “For every percent increase in HECA, companies expected a 3% reduction in the expected number of SIFs, holding worker hours constant”
SafetyInsights.org 