Posted By Stewart Hussey As a Manufacturing Manager who is qualified to MIOSH status I wear two hats frequently. I am mindful of a responsibility to take all accidents seriously and ensure the appropriate level of investigaton is carried out and remedial actions are implemented. However, as one of the measures of performance within a manufacturing environment is the amount of accidents/incidents recorded it does make one more aware of the amount of spurious minor injury reports that industry (and I am sure other fields) are having to contend with. I would greatly appreciate some feedback on whether anybody has a specific definition of minor injuries that would allow for challenging some of the time consuming, 'probably never happened' incidents that we have to deal with. I am aware of all the standard injury definitions quoted, but they are all so obvious and do not really address the issue Regards Stewart Hussey

Posted By Alec Wood Hi Stewart I too am in manufacturing and sympathise with your problem. I have long held the belief that to reduce accidents we must know about all of them. Using accident frequency rates as a KPI does nothing to reduce accidents, only to reduce reporting. Reduced reporting distorts your accident severity rate statistic painting a picture generally worse than the reality. I managed to persuade management to drop accident frequency rates, and "days since last accident" as KPI's and even as published stats. By concentrating on acheiving 100% reporting we were able to identify the real issues and act accordingly. For us the "real issue" was minor cuts with knives and sharp metal edges. More often than not supervisors appear to have been dishing out plasters and not recording. Once identified, a 80% real reduction in incidence was acheived. This went a long way to helping us to get a sceptical workforce to finally believe we were really committed to safety and not just KPI's. All these "spurious" accidents cost the business money and deserve the attention of management. Alec Wood Samsung Electronics (KPI=Key Performance Indicator)