LTIFR – A Measure of Safety Performance?
By Tom Gardener
Look at almost any company’s annual report and you’ll find some comments about what the business is doing to improve their safety performance – usually measured by the number of injuries they’ve had that year and more specifically how many of those injuries have required time off work for recovery. So, we get told what a good job they’re doing to prevent injuries and they measure they’re performance by how many times they’ve failed. Bizarre… definitely but not quite as bizarre as the wide spread use of the Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate or LTIFR which is an almost universal statistic used to report on safety performance and compare the performance of one company or part of a company with another.
What is the LTIFR? It’s a measure of the number of lost time injuries (LTI) per so many hours worked. For example, an LTIFR of 3 may mean 3 LTIs for every million hours worked or it could be 10 000 or 50 000 hours. So what does that tell the reader or the business? Think about it. If this years LTIFR is less than last year’s does this mean the company has a more effective safety program in place? Or, conversely, does a higher LTIFR indicate a less effective program? If one company has an LTIFR of 2.5 and another company an LTIFR of 5 does this mean that the latter company is less committed to safety or has a worse safety program?
Let’s break this down a little further. The almost universal definition of an LTI is a work related injury that results in the injured employee having at least one full shift off work – by definition this excludes the shift on which the injury happened. Converting this to a million hour LTIFR involves multiplying the number of LTIs by 1 000 000 and diving the result by the number of hours worked. So the LTIFR is influenced not only by the number of LTIs that happened but also by the number of hours worked. So 2 companies with the same number of LTIs but substantially different hours will end up with totally different LTIFRs – the larger the number of hours the lower the LTIFR.Have a look at the table below to see the calculation for different combination’s of hours and LTIs (hours across the top, LTIs on the left side):
…100K…200K…300K…400K…500K…600K…700K…800K…900K…1000K
1…10……..5…….3.3……2.5…….2……1.67…..1.43….1.25….1.1 1…….1
2…20…….10……6.67…….5……..4……3.33…..2.86…..2.5…..2.22…….2
3…30…….15…….10…….7.5…….6……..5……..4.29….3.75….3.33…….3
4…40…….20…..13.33……10…….8…….6.67…..5.71……5……4.44…….4
5…50…….25…..16.67….12.5……10……8.33…..7.14….6.25….5.55…….5
So if we return to our 2 companies, company A had an LTIFR of 2.5 and company B had 5. As you can see from the table there are a number of different combination’s that can produce these results and without knowing either the hours worked or the number of injuries, the LTIFR by itself doesn’t really say anything and reveals nothing about either company’s safety performance.
So, does the LTIFR reveal anything else? Not really. Since only one day off work is required for an injury to be classified as an LTI, the LTIFR doesn’t tell us how serious the injuries were or whether they resulted in a day, a week, a month or even a year off work. Since a fatality would not be considered an LTI they are similarly excluded from the calculation.
If the LTIFR reveals nothing of value why is it used so much? Quite simply because it’s easy. It’s easy to calculate and it’s easy to comprehend. As well, because it’s a frequency rate it provides an appearance of a standardised statistic that can be used to compare against other businesses or different parts of the same business. Generally, businesses that measure their safety performance using the LTIFR are businesses that have only a superficial commitment to improving safety performance. If they were serious they would quickly come to realise that this statistic provides them with nothing to evaluate their safety performance and it would be quickly abandoned in favour of other more meaningful sources of information.
So the next time you hear someone bragging about their great safety performance because of the declining LTIFR think about what you’re being told and ask some questions to see what they’re doing, how they’re doing it and what (if any) other measurements they are using to assess performance.
Tom Gardener has worked as a full time health and safety professional for more than 30 years in both government and private sectors. This has enabled him to gain a great deal of knowledge and experience in the practical management of health and safety in modern workplaces.
If you have a comment on this article or wish to read and/or comment on his other articles visit his blog at http://www.thesafetybloke.com
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