In this podcast episode, Dave Tibbetts, CSP, Chief Safety Officer of High Wire, discusses the critical need for construction safety professionals and leaders to focus on Serious Injury and Fatality Potential (SIF-P) events.

Tibbitts explains that while the construction industry has dramatically reduced its total recordable incident rate (TRIR) over the last 30 years, fatality rates have remained flat for the past 15-20 years. This stagnation is the driving force behind the increased focus on SIF prevention. He argues that the industry's sharp focus on TRIR has created a "critical gap in construction safety reporting," which gives a false sense of security and hinders the proactive prevention of catastrophic incidents.

The solution is to categorize, track, and learn from events that had the potential to result in a serious injury (life-threatening, life-altering) or fatality (SIF potential). This provides a much larger, more valuable dataset for learning and focusing prevention efforts on high-energy, high-risk exposures.

Categorizing events

A SIF potential event is an incident, near-miss, or exposure that had the potential to result in a SIF, even if the actual outcome was minor. "That's why the idea of categorizing events that had SIF potential could provide us with a lot more data to work with, to learn from, to understand, and help us to kind of focus our efforts,” Tibbetts said.

He says that over-reliance on Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) can lead to a false sense of security when rates are low, or an overreaction that negatively impacts project culture when minor incidents are elevated. TRIR doesn't provide visibility into high-risk exposures.

"You could have a low recordable rate, but you might be having a number of events occur on your project that have the potential to result in a serious injury or fatality,” Tibbetts said.

The most common and highest energy risk observed in construction is fall exposures (working at heights). Other risks include unprotected trenches, live electrical exposure, and unmanaged confined spaces. “By far, far and away, the most common SIF potential event that we have identified... are fall exposures, issues with working at height."

Effective Response

Tibbetts emphasizes that a SIF-P event is a learning opportunity and should not simply be corrected in the field and forgotten. Investigations must look beyond individual worker decisions to identify where the safety management system failed. Exposures provide the largest, most valuable data set.

The Future of Safety

While TRIR is still valuable, he says in the podcast interview, the industry is shifting to measuring and learning from all SIF potential events. This will provide a more complete picture of risk and performance, eventually leading to metrics for reducing SIF potential exposures over time. "I think what we're going to start to see... is that we are going to start measuring and learning from all events with SIF potential the same way that we've been measuring and learning from total recordable incident rate over the course of the last 30 years."

Listen to the podcast for the full interview.