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DEKRA Serious Injury and Fatality Prevention™ Services
A Proven Pathway for Controlling SIF Exposure
One of the most troubling and persistent worries of leaders is the potential for a Serious Injury and Fatality (SIF) event. These devastating events reverberate throughout the entire organization with lasting impacts beyond the immediate employees and site involved. Yet SIF events are notoriously difficult to predict because traditional safety metrics provide misleading and incomplete data.
The SIF prevention movement seeks to increase workplace safety by understanding the intersection of human behavior and work environments. As a leader and originator of the field, DEKRA combines extensive experience with a mindset of continuous improvement to question paradigms and further the understanding of exposure potential.
The result is DEKRA SIF Prevention™ Services. Risk assessments are designed to help companies identify potential serious injuries, proactively mitigate risk, and govern exposure control throughout the organization.
DEKRA’s SIF prevention strategy focused on saving lives and protecting employees. Our proven solution was developed based on years of experience and enhanced through client feedback. Because we recognize the urgency of SIF prevention, DEKRA’s experts can guide you from assessment to roadmap in as little as six weeks. Each program is customized and scaled to meet your organization’s safety maturity level, potential exposures, and specific requirements for safety performance. The process is designed for business continuity, withstanding turnover and leadership changes.
How do DEKRA SIF Prevention™ Services work?
The key to decreasing injury and illness rates is creating a focus on prevention by working proactively across the organization in a structured and consistent manner.
The first step is educating all employees on exposure identification and control with the help of safety professionals. This includes a risk assessment to understand the influences that impact safe decision-making, system implementation, and risk management plans. Sustained improvement in involve circumstances requires strong governance, verification of critical controls, and worker participation.
DEKRA’s holistic and sustainable model balances analysis with action and speeds time to implementation to avoid lost time incidents. It takes into account the need for care, compassion, and context in analyzing previous SIF events and implementing corrective measures. The training efforts process also distinguishes between scheduled and unscheduled events to maximize impact.
To reduce SIF incidents, DEKRA has created the SIF Potential Indicator. Safety programs help to simplify the process of identifying unsafe conditions and potential hazards to improve event learning.
No organization can be confident about sending workers home safely unless it has done all it can to identify and control SIF potential exposures. Neglecting machine safety measures can leave workers vulnerable to serious injuries or fatalities, emphasizing the need for proactive strategies. DEKRA’s SIF Prevention™ Services represent the best defense to avoid workplace fatalities.
- Signals Before Harm: Why Incidents Are Not the Beginning of Risk
- Technical White Paper: DEKRA SIF Prevention™ services, A Foundation for Sustainable SIF Exposure Control
- White Paper: The Two Types of Serious Injury and Fatal Exposure Incidents
- White Paper: Serious Injury and Fatality (SIF) Prevention in the Utility Industry- Moving Beyond Assessment to Implement
A serious injury and fatality event is a workplace incident that results in, or has the potential to result in, a life-threatening injury, life-altering injury, or fatality. SIF prevention focuses on identifying and controlling the exposures that could lead to these high-consequence outcomes.
Serious injury and fatality prevention is a proactive approach to identifying, assessing, and controlling workplace exposures with the potential to cause severe or fatal harm. An effective SIF prevention program addresses the interaction among people, work environments, organizational systems, leadership, and critical controls.
Traditional metrics such as total recordable incident rates measure the frequency of injuries but may not reveal the potential severity of workplace exposures. An organization can experience fewer injuries overall while still having uncontrolled exposures that could lead to a serious injury or fatality. SIF prevention provides a more focused view of high-consequence risk.
SIF potential, sometimes called SIFp, refers to the reasonable likelihood that an incident or exposure could have resulted in a serious injury or fatality, regardless of the actual outcome. Evaluating SIF potential helps organizations give high-risk events the appropriate level of review, learning, and corrective action.
Organizations can identify SIF exposures by reviewing work activities, incident data, near misses, operating conditions, safety systems, and the factors that influence employee decision-making. A SIF risk assessment helps determine where high-consequence exposures exist and whether the appropriate controls are present and effective.
Critical controls are safeguards that prevent a high-risk exposure from causing a serious injury or fatality or reduce the consequences if an event occurs. Critical control verification helps an organization confirm that these safeguards are in place, functioning properly, and used consistently.
Scheduled SIF exposures occur during planned high-risk work in which the hazards and necessary protections can be identified in advance. Unscheduled exposures arise unexpectedly and may require employees to recognize changing conditions and respond quickly. Effective SIF safety programs prepare employees and leaders to manage both types of exposure.
DEKRA begins by assessing an organization’s potential SIF exposures, existing safety systems, critical controls, leadership practices, and safety maturity. The findings are used to develop a customized roadmap for improving exposure identification, risk mitigation, governance, worker participation, and critical control verification. DEKRA can guide an organization from assessment to roadmap in as little as six weeks.