Two Different Populations

The classic accident triangle implies that reducing minor injuries proportionally reduces fatalities, because they share a common base. Decades of data have shown this is not reliably true.

What the evidence shows

• Many organisations have reduced recordable injury rates substantially over years while their fatality rate stayed flat.
• Only a minority of incidents have the potential to be fatal, and the events that precede fatalities are frequently not the events that precede sprains and lacerations.
• The controls that reduce minor injuries — housekeeping, handling technique, gloves, footwear — have little bearing on the exposures that kill.

Different causes

Minor injuries arise largely from everyday variation in ordinary work. Fatalities arise from a small number of high-energy exposures — falls from height, contact with vehicles and mobile plant, uncontrolled energy release, engulfment, electrocution, drowning, loss of containment — where a single control failure has no recovery.

What follows

Fatality prevention requires its own programme: identifying which activities carry fatal potential, defining the controls that must be present for those activities, and verifying those controls specifically. It is not a by-product of general safety improvement, and organisations that assume it is are frequently surprised.

The question is not "how many injuries did we have?" but "how many times this month was someone one failure away from being killed?"