Introduction

Highwire users can now categorize, investigate, and report on events with the potential to result in a Serious Injury or Fatality (SIF). These features were developed with input from an advisory group of Highwire customers who sought to use Highwire’s assessment, inspection, and incident tracking solutions to gain greater risk insights and deliver even safer work. 

Relying on TRIR isn’t Enough

For years, organizations have used recordable rate as a key metric for assessing safety performance, focusing on whether their organization’s rate meets or beats the industry average and whether they are reducing rates year over year. While this focus has contributed to significantly lower industry recordable rates, the national statistics on fatality rates have not seen a corresponding reduction.

Despite a nearly 50% decrease in recordable rate over the last 15 years, the fatality rate has remained relatively unchanged, with a slight increase in the number of fatalities observed in recent years. This discrepancy makes us think more critically about the relationship between recordable incidents and the exposures that result in more serious outcomes. While the industry has done a great job reducing the frequency of all injuries, the same can not be said about the most serious injuries and fatalities.

Highwire’s Shift to SIFs

To gain a more comprehensive understanding of safety performance and risk, it’s essential to consider not just recordables but also those events, including recordable incidents, near misses, and exposures that had the potential to result in a SIF. Aggregated data provides SIF insights that offer greater visibility into the risk on our job sites. Highwire is helping clients understand and analyze this data by introducing features within Inspections and Incidents, which track SIF-potential events. Organizations using these features can identify root causes and implement corrective measures to prevent future events by identifying and analyzing these high-risk exposures.

Highwire Incidents and SIF Review

Today, we investigate every recordable incident across the industry, regardless of severity, which has led to the decline in recordable rates. However, we are missing out on valuable opportunities to investigate and learn from events with SIF-potential because we do not consistently give a high level of attention to the most serious exposures. Clients can use Highwire Incidents to change that. Specifically, the SIF Review tab itemizes all incidents where a SIF-P observation has been made or where a worker injury has occurred:

To review and approve an incident as a SIF, you can click on the specific incident to perform a detailed review and either approve or reject the SIF categorization:

For Contactors that have been involved in one or more SIFs in the past 365 days, a SIF-p flag is triggered so that Clients can easily identify those Contractors in the Incidents tab:

In addition, Clients can see the number of SIF potential incidents that a Contractor has been involved in on the Incidents card in that Contractor’s Safety Tab:

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