Get Safety Performance Indicators 2011 Data

While lagging indicators can alert you to a failure in an area of your safety and health program or to the existence of a hazard, leading indicators allow you to take preventive action to address that failure or hazard before it turns into an incident.

An SPT represents our predicted improvement in safety performance as a result of our safety activities (i.e., mitigations). The SPT, built on an appropriate SPI, allows us to know whether or not our safety investment has actually achieved our safety objective.

Lead Indicators: the proactive measures that organisations undertake to assist in improving their safety outcomes. Lag Indicators: events that have already occurred that cause harm to the people that work in an organisation that are measured as an indicator of safety performance.

The formula is: (Number of recordable injuries x 200,000) / Employee total hours worked. Accident Frequency Rate: Describes the total number of accidents that impacted an employee's ability to work over a year. The formula is: (Number of recordable accidents x 200,000) / Employee total hours worked)

A leading indicator is a predictive measurement, for example; the percentage of people wearing hard hats on a building site is a leading safety indicator. A lagging indicator is an output measurement, for example; the number of accidents on a building site is a lagging safety indicator.

Lagging indicators measure what has already happened, such as accidents and injuries. Leading indicators measure the effectiveness of proactive activities and programs that aim to prevent future incidents and improve safety.

Agencies may develop safety performance indicators (SPIs) and safety performance targets (SPTs) to help them monitor and track safety performance. SPIs and SPTs serve as valuable tools to prioritize resources to address safety risk and monitor how well investments are working.