Our Approach

There are significant benefits in learning from SIFp incidents in the field before working in a high-hazard environments. Proactively verifying existing critical controls prevents serious incidences from occurring unnecessarily.  

For this client, we ran an independent review of all historical incidents, near misses and injuries with serious injury or fatality (SIF) potential. Goals included assessing the overall governance, reporting, and critical controls associated with high-risk activities.  

At a glance:

• Four and a half years’ worth of data

• 660 recorded incidents, near misses, and injuries  

• Deeper scrutiny analysis of 92 SIFp incidents focusing on corporate reporting, critical control effectiveness, and thematic analysis of human, local, and organisational contributing factors.

Research and Insight

Our key findings identified areas for improvement, including governance, critical control management, the incident management system, and people capability.  

Overall, we discovered that:

• motor vehicles accounted for 31% of SIFp incidents

• gravity-related events made up 35% of critical incidents

• other incidents involved working at heights, falling objects, and energy releases.

There were also misclassification issues:

• 71 serious injury and fatality potential (SIFp) incidents were underclassified

• 11 non-SIFp incidents were subject to excessive investigation efforts due to inconsistent corporate reporting standards

• resource misallocation was hindering the learning and improvement of critical controls

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Tangible Outcomes

In response, the organisation:  

• revised its incident classification standards

• performed bowtie analyses to better identify critical controls

• updated its risk management protocols

• fostered a stronger culture of incident reporting and learning.  

This data-driven approach helped pinpoint critical control vulnerabilities and sharpened verification processes, ensuring the effectiveness of both system-level and field-level applications of critical controls.

Together, our efforts resulted in a 30% reduction in initial SIF exposure. More importantly, the findings continue to shape and refine critical control improvement strategies in the field, enhancing long-term safety outcomes.

To learn more about our Meta Incident Analysis (MIA) framework for incident investigation, contact the Incident Analytics team.  

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