Abstract
Treatment Based Approach is the traditional approach used in personnel safety which is to "classify" actual incident consequence into categories based on the type of treatments. These includes: Loss Time Incident, LTI; Restricted Work Incident, RWI; Medical Treatment Incident, MTI; and First Aid Incident, FAI. Although treatment based approach gives historical metrics that are common across entire industries, provides comparisons on a similar basis and is consistent with many government reporting requirements. However, it has shortcomings because it's not descriptive of actual injury severity and it does not include potential injury severity therefore low consequence-high potential safety events (minor hurt, near misses) are often overlooked or simply not reported, investigated, or shared for lessons. It does not enable a culture of care. This implies that workforce can view safety focus to be on reducing the number of recordables (often by minimizing treatment) and not on the elimination of injuries. Therefore, there is a need to address potential severity in order to identify low consequence incidents that could have been severe or fatal and help determine the depth of investigation requirements (in addition to actual severity).
This paper analyzes the efficiency of a highly reputable company's ‘Hurt Based Approach’ to safety and the intention is to share this good practice with all interested parties hence the reason for this paper. The hurt based approach is used to identify the integral potential and consistent actual severity of an incident and also used as a cultural enabler. A comparison between ‘treatment based approach’ and ‘hurt based approach’ will be shown in this proposed paper using the selected company as a case study. Results and historical statistics revealed that there were significant reduction in number of workforce hurt and rate of workforce hurt (THIR) when using the ‘hurt based approach’.
