Statistics and Records
COR Element 12 deals with Statistics and Records
Injury statistics are known as a lagging indicator; it shows a company’s past performance. We have a saying in risk management that “what you see in your rear-view mirror (in the past) is what you will see in your windshield (in the future)”.
Statistics play an important part in understanding how your organization is performing and trending information can be used to improve your future performance. We classify injuries into five categories: fatal injury, lost time injury (progressive companies include restricted medical aid cases as a lost time injury), medical aid injury, first-aid injury and near miss incidents. In this article we will not look at definitions, however, we will describe how frequencies are generated.
We have two types of frequencies that are commonly used to benchmark our performance versus the competitors:
Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate (LTIFR) is the number of all lost time injuries multiplied by 200,000 (working hours constant) and divided by the company’s total working hours. These are recorded by calendar year.
Total Recordable Injury Frequency Rate (TRIFR) is the number of all lost time injuries plus medical aid cases, multiplied by 200,000 (working hours constant) and divided by the company’s total working hours. These are likewise maintained by calendar year.
The current COR audit tool verifies that an organization being audited meets implementations and use requirements of investigation and reporting. A COR Auditor will examine and evaluate the following:
Presence of well-documented procedures to organize, monitor and measure OH&S performance.
Evidence of properly developed and maintained corporate and/or project health and safety summaries.
Record measurements of company OH&S performance at the properly specified frequencies.
Document comparisons of current health and safety performance vs. past performance.
Analysis of statistics and subsequent identification of trends that may require further investigation.
Maintenance of appropriate first-aid treatment records.
Action plans based upon the summaries and recommendations of recent (internal and external) audits.
Method and timeliness of action plan communicated to workers and its implementation.
Consider your audience when communicating the action plan. It will likely result in greater retention if you communicate the relevant portions of the action plan(s) to each group: workers, management, and subcontractors.
Are you benefiting from the evaluation of injury statistical? Are you able to identify trends and develop action plans to prevent reoccurrence? Do your clients ask you to provide your safety statistics? Is your statistical performance better than that of your competitors?
Presented by Roger Belair and Jason Colucci - Approved COR Associate Auditors.
