Hi, I am going to be slightly lazy a paste in a resposnse I gave to an earlier thread 'HSE Accident fihgures' that was posted on 6 November. I for one have never really felt all that comfortable with using accident figures as being a particulalry reliable method of determining safety performance. Time and again I am asked to benchmark against other authorities to see how our performance compares. Sorry, but while there is a place for stats etc they are not for me the panacea of measuring health and safety performance. For the most part comparing the stats, which are in the main related to OUTCOMES seems to me to be rather a blunt instrument full of inconsistencies and often the comparison of 'apples with pears'. Ok so we all know what an over 3 day injury is, but get this one. I have someone who had an accident that was for the sake of the HSE statistics shows up as being nothing more than a reportable over 3 day injury. The reality for this chap is that he was off work for months, suffered a significant and for the time being at least 'life changing' injury and he has now been medically retired. Now, compare that with an over 3 day injury in which the person return to work after 5 days off and is back to 100% fitness. Even so using the 2 examples that I have, I have fallen into my own trap of talking about the outcome of the accident, which in the one case was significant. But hopefully some of you will see my point, yes stats have a place (I suppose) but they often compare apples with pears and only really dealing with outcomes and tell a very small part of the story and are IMVHO not a particulalry reliable indicator (have I already said that?