| Want to Reduce Your Accident Rate by 75%? |
4/27/07 |
I can do it for you in just five minutes. Yup, that’s right, just five simple minutes. Want to know how?
I simply change 75% of your “preventable” accidents to “non-preventable”, and then use only the remaining preventable ones to calculate your accident rate. I see this happen more often than I would like to, and it is not a practice I use. Whenever I work with a client I always want to see the total accident picture. The actual number of accidents that occurred regardless of fault is what I am interested in. Too many times I have looked at client vehicle accident rates that are very low, yet their injuries and repair costs are very high? That unbalanced equation never makes sense to me, and it never will.
If you are benchmarking your program performance against another organization, make sure you are classifying and counting accidents the same way. I also strongly recommend that a client develop their own accident definitions, based on industry standards and a little bit of common sense. Make sure you don’t vary from those definitions. If you do, it makes trending very difficult and you will not truly be able to see if the fleet safety interventions you adopted are working or not working.
We could also have a philosophical debate about how “all accidents are preventable” and therefore we don’t even need to categorize between preventable and non-preventable or use other terms like “chargeable” and “non-chargeable”. We will save that discussion for another day.
We could also debate whether to call them accidents or crashes, and the difference between the two and why one is a better classification than the other. I choose not to spend my energy there and I recommend you don’t either.
Spend your energy looking at events and see if there was just one thing that could have made a difference in lessening the severity or avoiding it completely. Don’t simply take “there was nothing I could do to avoid it” as an answer, and then move that accident into the non-preventable category.
I can promise you one thing, the family and friends visiting the injured person in the hospital or the ones that have to attend a funeral really don’t care who’s fault it was and whether it was chargeable or not.
One person injured is one too many—preventable or not!
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