Why Close Focus Upon Personell Injuries can be Damaging to Overall Safety
Authors: Navestad Pal , Saxvik Bjorn 
Published: December 2007

Traditionally safety has been measured by personal injury rate. It is also customary to set goals for this parameter. Most personal injuries are of minor consequence. Through a system for criticality assessment and analyses of underlying causes it can be shown that the causes for minor personal injuries are significantly different from causes for events which can be serious or critical. Criticality assessment is done by looking upon both real and potential consequences of an event. For instance a recordable injury where someone cuts his hand and is given 3 stitches is coded as not critical, but an event where a crane load is dropped close to workers is coded as critical.

Using this assessment it is shown that major causes for personal injuries are direct and focus mainly on the workers or operators in the field. These causes are of little importance for critical events, where more underlying causes such as the physical state of the equipment, procedure problems and the general knowledge of personnel are more important. Focusing only statistical measures for personal injuries, and using these as achievement factors and goals can lead to directing all efforts to correct the minor causes, and not upon the causes that can lead to serious or disastrous events. In the worst case, close focus upon recordable injuries may decrease overall safety because direction is concentrated on minor causes.

Background

In many companies, the goals and measures defined in an overall operating or strategic plan are regarded as key objectives. All oil companies operating on the Norwegian shell, and probably around the world, have goals relating to Health, Environment and Safety (HES). For Safety, the common measure has been the number of personal injuries. These measures are defined and named differently around the world. In the following, the Norwegian definitions, Lost Time Accident (LTA, any absence into next shift) and Medical Treatment (MT, prescription medicine or needing treatment by qualified nurse) are used. The sum of these is comparable to the US Recordable Injury definition.

Personal injuries are only a small part of unwanted events. In Phillips Petroleum Company Norway (PPCoN) these events are named Unintentional Events. These events are further classified into critical, somewhat critical and not critical events (see below and Navestad). All Unintentional Events are analysed according to causes. The findings from these analyses are presented and show why strong focus upon personnel injuries can lead to a more unsafe operation.

Critical and somewhat critical events As mentioned above, there are several types of Unintentional Events. The traditional division has been between personal injuries and near misses. PPCoN has found that this division is very hard to use in practice. Instead, Unintentional Events are divided into categories such as injuries, gas releases, fires, shutdowns, environmental releases, material losses and near misses. PPCoN treats all these types in exactly the same way with regard to determining criticallity.

P. 171