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<\/p>\nIs actively verifying critical safety controls the key to preventing workplace fatalities?<\/p>\n
\t<\/p>\n
SIF information comes from WCB Alberta, and it includes any injury claim that was either a fatality or had 50+ days of lost time. TRIF information comes from ESC\u2019s Personal Safety Data initiative, and it includes voluntarily reported contractor and employee data from about 50 large O&G producers.<\/p>\n
A single chart from Energy Safety Canada vividly illustrates a common misconception regarding fatality prevention in high-hazard industries1.<\/p>\n
This chart compares the Total Recordable Injury Frequency (TRIF) (black line) with the Serious Injury and Fatality (SIF) rate (yellow line) for Alberta\u2019s oil and gas industry from 2009 to 2024. Throughout this period, the TRIF has steadily trended downwards, suggesting that the industry has been successful in reducing its injury rate. But over the same period, the SIF rate has essentially flattened.<\/p>\n
Given that the usual interpretation of a decreasing TRIF is that safety is improving, why hasn\u2019t the SIF rate also improved?<\/p>\n
How organizations think about safety <\/p>\n
To understand the reason for this divergence, we need to take a step back and examine how organizations typically approach the responsibility of keeping their people safe.<\/p>\n
The typical approach, based on conversations I\u2019ve had with senior leaders in the industry, is to put a safety system in place, usually in the form of policies and procedures, and then ensure workers comply with it. The effectiveness of the system is then evaluated by monitoring the TRIF: if it trends downward, this is seen as validation that the organization is managing risk effectively.<\/p>\n
While this approach seems reasonable, it\u2019s contradicted by the chart: a decreasing TRIF doesn\u2019t necessarily mean that your SIF risk is being adequately managed. Using the TRIF as a proxy for safety is problematic for many reasons, but a key one is that the causes of most incidents that contribute to the TRIF differ from those of incidents that seriously injure or kill people.<\/p>\n
Most incidents that make up the TRIF are relatively minor, such as slips, trips or hand injuries. But SIFs tend to result from incidents involving a significant release of energy, such as falls from height, gas explosions or being struck by mobile equipment or vehicles.<\/p>\n
Not only do the causes of these more serious incidents differ from those of many incidents that make up the TRIF, but the controls that prevent or mitigate them also differ. This means that when an organization focuses on reducing the number of incidents that contribute to the TRIF, this doesn\u2019t translate into an improvement in its ability to manage its SIF risk.<\/p>\n
This is what the chart above so clearly illustrates: the industry appears to have made a marked improvement in managing the types of incidents that make up the TRIF, but this hasn\u2019t translated into an improvement in the SIF rate, nor should we have expected it to.<\/p>\n
Fatality prevention<\/p>\n
So, how should an organization approach preventing SIFs?<\/p>\n
To answer this question, it\u2019s useful to look at analysis conducted by the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM), which examined fatalities across its member companies from 2021 to 20242. Over 80 per cent of fatalities occurred not because a hazard was unknown, but because the controls that were meant to prevent it were ineffective. These controls were either inadequately designed or poorly executed. In most cases, the organizations had identified the hazard and designed and implemented a control, yet when it was needed, it didn\u2019t work as intended. Another way to think about this finding is that it\u2019s not hazards that kill people, but ineffective controls.<\/p>\n
A key aspect of preventing serious incidents and fatalities is ensuring that your controls for SIF risks are not only in place, but also effective. Identify the handful of critical controls that stand between your people and serious or fatal injury, define clear, unambiguous performance criteria for them and then make a deliberate effort to verify that they genuinely meet these criteria. You also need to proactively hunt for weaknesses in these controls before an incident occurs, rather than assuming they\u2019ll be self-evident. The mechanics of how you achieve this in practice (i.e., using bowties and gathering early warning signs of control weakness on a per-control basis) is a topic for another time, but the principle is straightforward: stop obsessing about the absence of minor injuries and actively confirm the effectiveness of the controls that keep people alive.<\/p>\n
The TRIF distraction<\/p>\n
Fatality prevention is about creating a company-wide understanding of the importance of effective controls. The irony is that the laser-like focus most organizations place on the TRIF, often driven by a genuine commitment to keeping their people safe, may be the very thing distracting them from preventing fatalities. Monitor the TRIF, but don\u2019t fall into the trap of believing that, by doing so, you\u2019re effectively managing your SIF risk.<\/p>\n
Sources: <\/p>\n
SIF information comes from WCB Alberta, and it includes any injury claim that was either a fatality or had 50+ days of lost time. TRIF information comes from ESC\u2019s Personal Safety Data initiative, and it includes voluntarily reported contractor and employee data from about 50 large O&G producers. Dr. Sean Brady is a forensic engineer who investigates engineering failures from a technical and organizational perspective. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Is actively verifying critical safety controls the key to preventing workplace fatalities? SIF information comes from WCB Alberta,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":199054,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-199053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-canada","tag-canada"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199053\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/199054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\u201cSafety Performance Report.\u201d International Council on Mining and Metals. Accessed at https:\/\/www.icmm.com\/website\/publications\/pdfs\/health-and-safety\/2025\/benchmarking-safety-data-2024.pdf?cb=112368<\/a>.<\/p>\n