The Relationship between Minor and Serious injuries

You can debate the validity of Heinrich’s accident ratios and numbers or the re-evaluation of them by Frank Bird in his Industrial Accident Prevention, but the bottom line in these discussions is that there are three important things we can learn from these powerful concepts:

First - there is a distinct mathematical relationship between incidents of similar type and how severe there are.  You can use technology to keep track of where your company is in relation to industry standards and even calculate this ratio for yourself. 

Second – it is not plant, equipment or location which accounts for the majority of safety incidents but employee behavior. 

Third – by reducing overall frequency of workplace injuries the number of severe or fatal injuries will consequently reduce.

Too Simplistic? 

Maybe, as there are scores of mathematicians and engineers out there who would love to delve deeply into these theories and discover the root causes of the minor injuries and deal with these then to uncover a proportionate effect on serious injuries. 

Ultimately the vast majority of underlying causes of minor and serious injuries have one thing in common: someone’s behavior. These may be the behaviors of operators, supervisors, managers or directors – or more likely a combination of all of these in a domino effect.

Sure, anyone can argue the validity of these models.  But they provide us with the very important point that by reporting near misses and minor injuries we can learn the lessons of why they occurred.  Most companies put too much focus on the top of the triangle (reactive) and not enough on the bottom (proactive).

As long as we don’t take these models too literally or get hung up on the numbers, they remain a very valuable safety tool.

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