Posted By pschu Hi, I have participated in construction industry as a safety officer for several years. I am doubtful for the safety performance indicator. How to measure whether the site safety performance is good or not? Our safety department have formulated a number of such indicators e.g. accident rate, number of breaching of statutory requirements, cost of accident, accumulated days of accident free and so on. Anyway, I find that all of them cannot really pinpoint to our expectation. In my opinion, perhaps the size of the company car for the safety officer is a good indicator as it reflects the status of safety officer on the company. I seek your valuable comments regarding safety performance indicator. Regards, PS

Posted By pschu Ian, Thank you for your comment. Would you like to provide your mentioned website address in details to me? I had better study it in details. Regards, PS

Posted By Chris Pollington Hi PS I believe this came up a while ago on the forum and had a mixed response. My thoughts are that it would not be a useful indicator, as many companies,(mine included) have a good safety management system and managers who are very supportive of safety issues, but no company cars, so in comparison to a company with a poor safety system, but a safety officer with a clapped out mark 3 cortina*, ours would look worse. I think the reactive quantative measures i.e numbers of accidents etc are useful, we also have a target incident rate that we measure against. If you can find proactive things to measure it is even better. Simple things like managers attendance at safey meetings tells you a lot about a company and how it views safety issues. *(apologies to all the owners of mk 3 cortinas who may consider them as classics) Chris.

Posted By Chris Pollington Hi PS Any statistics are only as good as the data used to collate them, so your under reporting will effect them. Equally we all know that the HSEs statistics based on RIDDOR reports are highly inacurate for the same reasons, but we still except them as a benchmark. I still have a concern that the size of the car may convince the senior managers that they are doing a good job but I would not like to try and use that argument with my local HSE inspector. I could see the conversation going like this: "hello Chris, I want to talk to you about how safety is being managed at this site". "oh yes Mr Inspector, I've got a nice new car and it's top of the range" "So!" "Well that means we're doing well on the safety side of things" "Hmmmm I had better take a closer look then" "Oh Oh" In my experience costs influence managers more than any other factor, if you can get to a situation where the costs of accidents are shown as a percentage of project costs it may help persuade those at the top that safety is important as it means more profit for them, of course you can only apply this to those accidents that are reported. I'm not in the construction industry so I could be talking out of my hat, Is this a common problem? Chris.