In Brief

• The past 10 years have brought big advances in using performance indicators to measure the success of safety and health prevention and intervention programmes.
• Pressure is growing to demonstrate a clear link between a company's health and safety measures, and its performance and productivity. This is a challenging task.
• Until recently, OHS performance was largely gauged by negative outcomes - workplace injury and illness.
• Negative measures do not recognise the positive steps a company takes.
• Having a low incidence of injury does not necessarily mean that adequate safety systems and controls are in place.
• Today the move is towards using a 'basket' of measures that provide information on a range of health and safety activities - both positive and negative.
• That basket includes outcome indicators that show if an organisation is achieving its targets, and positive performance indicators that measure the pro-active steps it has taken to improve performance and achieve those targets.

Over the past decade, the use of OHS performance indicators to measure the success of prevention and intervention programmes has advanced considerably. Not only are they essential management tools, they are also an integral part of a company's quality assurance systems and performance strategies. On the back of these changes, pressure is growing to demonstrate clear links between a company's productivity and performance, and the standard of its health and safety processes, based on these indicators. This is a challenging task.

Until recently, the primary measures of health and safety performance have been things that go wrong:

• The number of claims.
• The cost of the claims.
• The number of days lost - 'lost time injury' frequency rates, or LTIs.

Lost Time Injury rates are calculated as the number of occurrences of injury, divided by the total number of hours worked by all workers in the recording unit, for each one million hours worked - LTIs/total hours x 1,000,000.

However, in the 1990s, this reliance on negatively-focused outcome indicators was challenged.

The criticisms of the outcome indicators are that they:

• measure failure and not success
• only reflect past actions, and not the steps taken by an organisation to improve its performance
• are subject to random fluctuations
• only count absenteeism and ignore any gradual impairment in people who are still able to come to work
• do not measure the incidence of occupational disease
• may under-report (or over-report) injuries, and may vary as a result of subtle differences in criteria
• are particularly limited for assessing the potential risk of incidents that have a low probability, but major consequences if they do occur - that is, having a low incidence of injury does not necessarily mean that adequate safety systems and controls are in place
• do not quantify the value of lost production when employees are injured or ill.

"Lost Time Accident figures have only limited value... If senior managers pay great attention to the LTA rate and nothing else, they are sending out the message that they do not really know why incidents occur and what should be done and if this is so, safety cannot be very important..." (Kletz, 1993:409)

"Health and safety differs from many areas measured by managers because success results in the absence of an outcome (injuries or ill health) rather than a presence. But a low injury or ill health rate, even over a period of years, is no guarantee that risks are being controlled and will not lead to injuries or ill health in the future." (Health and Safety Executive, 2001:5)

Change is underway with a move toward using a 'basket' of more sophisticated measures that provide information on a range of health and safety activities - both positive and negative.

Today, OHS performance indicators are typically a mix of outcome indicators and positive performance indicators (PPls). Outcome indicators show if an organisation is achieving its targets, while PPIs measure the actions taken to achieve targets. PPIs allow an organisation to measure what it does pro-actively to improve outcome performance. Examples are:

• the number of safety audits conducted
• the percentage of sub-standard conditions identified and corrected
• the percentage of employees with adequate health and safety training.

To be effective, PPIs must contain a number of features:

• They must be clearly defined, relevant and linked to the organisation's OHS strategic goals.
• They must be measurable and statistically valid.
• The process needs to represent current performance and be cost effective.
• As with any OHS intervention, the procedure needs to be fully evaluated.

In recent times, positive performance indicators have been incorporated into quality performance management systems - in particular, the model for continuous improvement in which all aspects of a process are monitored and controlled. The OHS quality model for process improvement (below) has three main elements:

1. Input or activity measures: Examples are: how many risk assessments are conducted; how much safety training is done; and how many safety meetings have been scheduled. It is not easy to demonstrate a direct relationship between the input and the resulting outcome, or identify underlying problems.
2. Process or focus area measures: These measure indicators within the process and, in doing so, focus on the predominant types of injuries that can be expected to happen (such as strains and sprains) and illnesses (such as deafness). They also monitor practices and behaviours associated with core activities, such as manual handling and repetitive work. The focus should cover all core risks and any measures of how effective risk reduction is (for example, isolation deviations). Risk control measures can only be deemed effective if a significant reduction in specific injuries or illnesses can be clearly shown.
3. Output or action plan measures: These measure outputs in terms of the achievement of objectives. Such performance measures can be used to track progress towards achieving a goal, and can relate to individual performance as well as operations performance.