Serious Injury and Fatality Prevention

For over a decade, many organizations have started to embrace a new paradigm associated with the prevention of serious injuries and fatalities (SIFs). Some companies are in the early stages of deployment, while others are searching for ways to refresh or enhance their existing SIF prevention approaches. This new paradigm is centered around the fact that across much of industry, while traditional safety performance metrics (such as Total Recordable and Lost Time Incident Rates) are trending steadily downward, the rate of the incidence of serious injuries and fatalities has been plateauing, and in some cases increasing. This calls for different and new prevention strategies to prevent SIFs that go beyond traditional safety management approaches.

The execution of these prevention strategies are improved by the application of Visual Literacy tools. Seeing more clearly the presence of precursors to SIFs can result in taking preventative actions in advance of a potential SIF incident. As a form of critical thinking, Visual Literacy improves our ability to see and more accurately interpret what we see. Nowhere is this more important than SIF prevention.