Safety Statistics

Statistics, if wisely compiled, can be very useful to people who are concerned about safety in the workplace. For example, data collected over a 15-year period in a company with 100,000 employees have shown conclusively that employees who are new on a job suffer more than 50% of all injuries. Job safety analysis has resulted in bringing previously ignored or unrecognized hazards to supervisory and management attention. It is important for safety professionals to learn to understand what statistics mean and what they do not mean. The meaning of statistics to safety or the control of hazards is the difference between the raw numbers less the numbers that simply reflect the probabilities of random chance. Statistics often can show that what is called "accident-proneness" may be more reasonably attributed to lack of adequate training or the lack of hazard-controlled designs of tools, equipment, facilities, and work environment.