Reactive monitoring measures and their usefulness

Reactive health and safety management means dealing with problems, accidents and incidents after they occur. The measures include:

• injuries and cases of ill health
• dangerous occurrences
• damage to property
• weaknesses or omissions in performance standards
• worker complaints
• enforcement notices
• customer complaints

In the long term, reactive measures tend to cost more. You have to put in place many of the same things you could have done before the accident, plus the extra cost, time and resources that an accident brings.

Despite this weakness, reactive monitoring is a valid tool, provided active monitoring is also carried out. Each measure gives the organisation a chance to check performance, learn from mistakes, and improve the management system and risk controls. Collecting information on serious injury and ill health is not a major problem for most organisations, but learning about minor injuries, other losses, incidents and hazards can be harder.

Why lessons need to be learned from beneficial and adverse events

Leading indicators are valuable whether or not you have a safety and health programme, whatever it contains and whatever stage it has reached, and OSHA encourages employers to start using them now. They can improve performance in several ways, helping employers to:

• prevent workplace injuries and illnesses
• reduce costs linked to incidents
• improve productivity and organisational performance
• optimise safety and health performance
• raise worker participation

Leading indicators are proactive and preventive measures. They show how effective safety and health activities are and reveal potential problems in a programme. They can play a vital part in preventing deaths, injuries and illnesses.

Many employers are more familiar with lagging indicators. These measure how often events occurred in the past, such as the number or rate of injuries, illnesses and fatalities. They measure safety occurrences, particularly the negative outcomes the organisation is trying to prevent, and they are mainly used for long-term trends, either at a high level or for particular types of occurrence or locations. Because they measure outcomes, they can be used to judge how effective safety measures or initiatives are and to validate the performance of the system. Trends in them can also show whether latent conditions exist in current systems that need attention.

Leading and lagging indicators compared

Leading indicators are proactive, preventive and predictive measures that give information about how well your health and safety activities perform. Lagging indicators are the opposite and focus on safety incidents that happened in the past. They highlight existing failures in the safety programme, and monitoring them lets you make positive changes instead of letting the same hazards keep causing accidents.

Lagging indicators can alert you to a failure in some part of the programme or to the existence of a hazard. Leading indicators are important because they tell you whether your activities are preventing incidents. A good programme uses leading indicators to drive change and lagging indicators to measure effectiveness.

Summary notes for Element 4 · Cheat sheet · Glossary. A study aid, not published or endorsed by NEBOSH.