What to focus on - Accident or Injury?
Thanks to safety professionals for responding to the topic “Why I called LTIFR a DECEPTIVE”. I judged from the responses I received that there is confusion in between Accident and Injury. As a matter of fact, many safety professional use these terms interchangeably but we need to have clear understanding about the both.
Accident is an undesirable, unplanned and unwanted event that may results into some kind of loss. The loss may be in terms of first aid, disabling injury or fatal and also may be loss to asset/environment. So injury is one of the several losses post an accident. So in that sense, injury is aftermath of an accident.
Now, what should we aim for prevention - Injury or Accident? Your answer must be Accident. Why, because of the following facts:
There is very thin control on severity of an injury. An accident should not treated as minor or major based on the extent of injury sustained because it is merely a coincidence (someone may say it luck) after an accident.
For example, take a simple case of slip-fall and think of all hypothetical outcomes:
⦁ If a person fall on same level and self help – he/she may sustain a bruise/cut - a first aid injury
⦁ If slip followed by fall to a different level - person may sustain fracture - a temporary disabling injury
⦁ If in a fall, the person’s head struck against fixed structure - person may sustain brain haemorrhage - a disabling injury or even a death.
⦁ If a person after fall struck with unguarded moving parts – person may sustain amputation of body parts – a permanent disabling injury.
Do you see, the same accident is resulting into different injuries depending upon the circumstances at that moment of time?
Now, should we ignore a slip-fall accident because most of time we experience it resulting into a fist aid case?
Should we not analyse it properly to arrive at reasons attributable to factors related to person, behaviour, and environment?
Therefore, I would say to focus on the programs for prevention of accidents for better safety result (which is well within our control with deploying suitable intervention) rather to decide further course of action based on the injury.
all blogs are available at page "useful information at www.safetitude.com
Accident is an undesirable, unplanned and unwanted event that may results into some kind of loss. The loss may be in terms of first aid, disabling injury or fatal and also may be loss to asset/environment. So injury is one of the several losses post an accident. So in that sense, injury is aftermath of an accident.
Now, what should we aim for prevention - Injury or Accident? Your answer must be Accident. Why, because of the following facts:
There is very thin control on severity of an injury. An accident should not treated as minor or major based on the extent of injury sustained because it is merely a coincidence (someone may say it luck) after an accident.
For example, take a simple case of slip-fall and think of all hypothetical outcomes:
⦁ If a person fall on same level and self help – he/she may sustain a bruise/cut - a first aid injury
⦁ If slip followed by fall to a different level - person may sustain fracture - a temporary disabling injury
⦁ If in a fall, the person’s head struck against fixed structure - person may sustain brain haemorrhage - a disabling injury or even a death.
⦁ If a person after fall struck with unguarded moving parts – person may sustain amputation of body parts – a permanent disabling injury.
Do you see, the same accident is resulting into different injuries depending upon the circumstances at that moment of time?
Now, should we ignore a slip-fall accident because most of time we experience it resulting into a fist aid case?
Should we not analyse it properly to arrive at reasons attributable to factors related to person, behaviour, and environment?
Therefore, I would say to focus on the programs for prevention of accidents for better safety result (which is well within our control with deploying suitable intervention) rather to decide further course of action based on the injury.
all blogs are available at page "useful information at www.safetitude.com
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