What Counts as a Serious Injury or Fatality

A serious injury or fatality (SIF) programme can only work if people agree on what they are trying to prevent. Different organisations use slightly different definitions, but most share the same core. A fatality is a death caused by work. A serious injury, in this sense, is one that is life-threatening or life-altering: the person may not recover fully, or their life is permanently changed. This is a different idea from a "recordable" or "lost-time" injury, which are defined by treatment or days off, not by severity.

Actual and potential

Organisations usually track two groups:

• Actual SIF: an event that caused a fatality or a life-threatening or life-altering injury.
• SIF potential: an event that did not cause such harm but could have, if circumstances had been slightly different. Near misses and minor injuries can both be SIF-potential events.

The second group is much larger and is where most of the learning lies, because it shows the same failures as fatal events without anyone being killed.

Worked example: two injuries, two classifications

Two workers at a steel plant each received a cut hand on the same day. The first cut his hand on a sharp edge while handling a small bracket. The second received a minor cut when a heavy coil shifted on a rack and his hand was caught at the edge as he pulled away. Both were minor injuries. The first had no SIF potential. The second did: a coil weighing several tonnes moved while a person was within reach of it, and the control that should have held it, the rack chock, was missing.

Worked example: a near miss with no injury

A forklift reversed out of a container and passed less than a metre behind a pedestrian. Nobody was hurt. The event was classified as SIF potential because a moving vehicle and a person were in the same space without the planned separation.