Is your injury rate telling you next to nothing about fatality risk?
For years, ‘safety’ has been measured by counting what went wrong – e.g. recordables, TRIFR, LTIFR (*what is actually called ‘unsafety’).
But serious injuries and fatalities, or SIFS, haven’t followed the same consistent downward trend.
This raises the question: are we measuring the ‘wrong’ thing?
This video unpacks a 2026 study from Bayona, Hallowell and others who analysed 999 field assessments from 31 utility & construction companies, testing whether two short-term measures predicted serious harm potential.
The measures were:
a) Pre-job safety brief (PJSB) quality: evaluating the engagement and thoroughness of pre-task discussions.
b) High-energy control assessment (HECA): the proportion of high-energy hazards with a direct control in place.
They found:
1) Companies with better pre-job briefs tended towards better energy controls
2) Each 1-point increase in HECA was associated with ~3% fewer expected SIFs
They also found that better pre-job briefs were linked to ** more ** reported SIFS, but does this represent better reporting, or something else?
#SIF #constructionsafety #safetyscience #workplacesafety #WHS #OHS
