Beware of LTIFR- It’s DECEPTIVE

Many of us use LTIFR and like statistics to measure the safety performance but how much it helps an organisation to gauge health of their safety performance or to compare with other like organisation as benchmark are confusing. I fear much opposition to this however, in the interest of the profession I must tell my mind that LTIFR never contribute any good to safety improvement or anything to take inference from. It has very little predictive value to understand about the safety culture or as indicator of achievement / failure in safety. You may have heard much industry boast of no LTI – lost time injury for many years and hence zero FR- frequency rate and all of a sudden many deaths are reported. You may be working or had worked in an industry wherein accidents of severe nature would have happened after many years of good times and not to mention here that you might have been cheering up this good time based on zero or near zero LTIFR.

Now, it is my opinion that the focus on these LTIFR type numbers gives false belief at all levels of a hierarchy; actually cover up underlying weaknesses in terms of at-risk behaviours of workers. It may be said that such situation leads to an atmosphere of complacency in the organisation. The organisation on the pretext of good safety culture curtails resources on safety and gradually the situation ends with major accident(s) on one fine day.

So instead of falling prey to this deceptive trap of LTIFR, let’s employ suitable safety indicators so as to get concurrent feedback on the health of the organisation in order to maintain and sustain a total safety culture situation.

You may write if you want to know the suitable indices to be measured and tracked in safety at www.safetitude.com.