Do your safety inspections keep finding the same deficiencies over and over again? Do “unsafe conditions” rather than systems or process safety issues dominate your findings? Are your safety inspection issues assigned to the safety staff rather than the actual … Read More
Jim Loud
Our Stubborn Problem with Serious Incidents and Fatalities (SIFs) – Part II
Risk exists in an interactive system, much of which is beyond the workers’ influence. Risk and reliable performance are, therefore, systems issues, not personal issues. Bringing risk to an acceptable level begins with analyzing the work, not just the personal … Read More
Our Stubborn Problem with Serious Incidents and Fatalities – Part I
In 2011, Terry Norris, then president of the American Society of Safety Professionals, commented on the failure of American companies to reduce the rate of serious incidents and fatalities (SIFs). “A statistical plateau of worker fatalities is not an achievement, … Read More
Systems vs. Symptoms: We Need to Take a Deeper Look
The Bureau of Labor Statistics just published its fatality statistics for 2019 and the results should concern us all. Fatalities in 2019 jumped to 5333, the highest figure since 2007 and the fifth time in the last six years that … Read More
Don’t Get Blinded by Your Injury Numbers
“What we are measuring is not safety but unsafety” Craig Marriott in Challenging the Safety Quo. “Many companies…continue to measure their systemic safety by the lost time frequency rate…Unfortunately this reflection of personal injury rates provides little or no indication … Read More
Plan Do Check Act NOT Plan Do Hope Pray – Building an Effective Safety Management System
Most safety management systems (SMS) are based on the Deming/Shewhart Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle. We discussed PDCA in a previous article, but today’s article will take a closer look at the check step. Why single out the check step? Well, there … Read More
