Page 98 - Occupational Health & Safety, July 2018

CONSTRUCTION SAFETY
Three Questions to Ensure Continuous Improvement of Your Incident Reduction Strategy
An observation program is a critical process that will provide the data to identify what and where risks are occurring.
BY GRACE HERRERA Every OH&S professional aims to reduce inci- dents and injuries, but is their strategy as effi- cient and effective as it could be? Continuous improvement is vital in keeping your pro- cesses and programs relevant toward achieving your goals. In an effort to maintain an effective safety pro- cess on your quest to reducing incidents and injuries,
ask yourself these three questions:
■ What are our biggest risks?
■ What processes do we have in place to help
minimize/eliminate these risks?
■ Are these procedures, processes, and programs
actually being utilized/implemented by our team, and are they effective?
What are our biggest risks? These can be identified by reading through observation data, incident investi- gation data, near miss reports, and the already known high-hazard work done by your teams.
What processes do we have in place to help mini- mize/eliminate these risks? These can be a combina- tion of standard operating procedures, job hazard analysis, observation process, training programs, etc. Note: Not all processes are safety department-specific. Some of these include hiring practices, management practices, etc.
Are these procedures, processes and programs ac- tually being utilized/implemented by our team, and are they effective? Reviewing the utilization and effec- tiveness can be done in a number of ways, to include observing the work being performed and comparing it to your standard operating procedures and review- ing your results periodically in an effort to correlate the impact your processes and training programs have on your losses.
Identify the Risks
Lagging indicators are data points that are considered to be reactive to an occurrence, versus leading indica- tors that allow opportunities to implement proactive strategies to prevent occurrences. Both can provide the data points to help identify the gaps within your processes and programs. An example of a lagging indicator is your incident data. Reviewing the inci- dent data should provide insight into what process/ programs unsuccessfully provided the information necessary to perform the task safely and/or where the team unsuccessfully followed the process/program.
An example of a leading indicator is your observation process. The purpose of the observation process is to identify risky behaviors and conditions and intervene to prevent incidents. Observation data details such as project, contractor, category, and comments will pro- vide the information you will need to answer the three questions above.
Observation Data—
At Risk Behaviors and Conditions
An observation program is a critical process that will provide the data to identify what and where risks are occurring. Observation data points are snapshots in time of the behaviors and conditions at a spe- cific project. These are your leading indicators, also known as precursors to an incident. Utilizing the ob- servation data points to track and trend at-risk be- haviors and conditions is a great practice to pinpoint where you should focus your efforts and resources to reduce your incidents.
The trends will identify areas of your work that need a review of processes and procedures and pos- sible needs for training. Depending on how the ob- servation process is structured, the data points can help not only determine what type of work is being performed, but also identify which crew is taking these specific risks. Charts 1 and 2 are examples of at-risk observations by sub-category and crew/sub- contractor (company).
Take it one step further by trending the total number of observations and comparing them to the number of at-risk observations. Over time, these data points will define if the project is observing behaviors and conditions in a consistent manner. You can use these metrics to define a probability model for your projects. Probability models are effective in prompt- ing a review of data points for those specific locations with higher percentages. Table 3 is a result by project illustrating the percent of probability the location has of sustaining an incident.
Incident Investigation—
Root Cause Analysis Results
Incident root cause analysis results provide the details of the incident, as well as the root cause of each fail- ure within the process or procedure. These are your lagging indicators. A review of the process and pro-
92 Occupational Health & Safety | JULY 2018
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