Safety leaders 'spending too much time focusing on TRIF and not focusing on SIF'

Over nearly a decade of incident data, ISN’s latest Serious Injury & Fatality (SIF) Insights report finds that workers are still being seriously hurt and killed at stubbornly high rates, even as traditional recordable incident rates decline.

The sixth edition of the white paper analyzes more than 178,000 OSHA‑recordable incidents reported by over 4,000 U.S. contractors between 2017 and 2024, flagging more than 20,000 cases that meet OSHA’s criteria for serious injuries: fatalities, in‑patient hospitalizations, amputations and loss of an eye. In 2024 alone, ISN identified 1,693 SIF cases, but the number of contractors experiencing a SIF fell to 705, down from more than 1,000 the previous year.

Joe Schloesser, senior vice-president of technical services at ISN, says the new analysis is designed to help organizations move beyond counting total injuries and focus on what is driving life‑altering harm.

“We’ve been focusing on these lagging indicators for so long that we haven’t really found a way to drive down serious incidents,” he says. “You’re going to see incident rates have reduced, and we’re focused on incident rates. It just doesn’t drive down serious incidents.”

Energy lens highlights familiar hazards

A key addition in this edition is an “energy‑based safety” lens, which classifies incidents by the dominant energy source involved – using categories such as gravity, motion and mechanical energy.

Across three years of contractor OSHA log data, ISN found that gravity, motion and mechanical energy together account for nearly 90 per cent of serious injury cases. Motion and gravity alone dominate fatalities, a pattern reinforced by an analysis of nearly 2,400 OSHA fatality inspection records from 2022–2024.

Transportation incidents are a major factor. Schloesser notes that in the U.S., “over a third of all fatalities are transportation related,” including both roadway crashes and workers struck by or caught between vehicles and mobile equipment. At the same time, falls from height and objects falling from elevation remain central gravity‑related risks.

These are not obscure, hard‑to‑see hazards, Schloesser points out. Research behind the widely used Energy Wheel suggests gravity, motion and mechanical energy are among the most easily recognized sources on a job site. Yet they continue to drive the bulk of catastrophic outcomes, raising questions about how controls are implemented and sustained in day‑to‑day work.

Beyond OSHA: ASTM Level One and machine learning

To deepen its view of severity, ISN also mapped incidents against ASTM E2920‑19 “Level One” injuries – a global framework that focuses on specific serious outcomes such as fractures, amputations, significant burns and musculoskeletal disorders requiring surgery. Using that lens, the company identified 3,170 Level One injuries in 2024, nearly double the number of OSHA‑defined SIFs, even though the Level One total has declined 28 per cent since 2022.

Based on the ASTM classification, lacerations, cuts and fractures together account for more than 80 per cent of contractor SIF cases. That suggests organizations may be missing learning opportunities when injuries are severe but fall outside OSHA’s narrow severe‑injury criteria – for example, fractures that do not lead to hospital admission.

ISN’s data science team is applying machine‑learning techniques, including large language models, to parse OSHA 300 log descriptions and classify incidents across these frameworks. The models, reviewed and refined with input from health and safety professionals, are intended to surface patterns that might be hard to see with manual review alone.

Rethinking metrics for safety leaders

For Schloesser, the thread running through these findings is the need for health and safety leaders to challenge what they measure and report – particularly in high‑risk work.

“Too many organizations, too many employers are spending too much time focusing on TRIF and not focusing on SIFs,” he says. Safety professionals often see the gap, he adds, but struggle to convince senior leadership to adopt new metrics that feel less familiar or comparable across companies.

Newer approaches, such as energy‑based safety and the ASTM SIF framework, explicitly emphasize severity and potential severity, including “what almost happened.” Schloesser argues these tools can equip safety teams to have different conversations in the boardroom about where risk really lives and what controls matter most.

“SIFs continue to be a challenge, but using some of these new approaches is really driving quite a bit of insight into the nature and understanding of these incidents,” he says. “We have to start thinking about the metrics that we report on, the ones that we hold ourselves accountable to and what leadership comes to expect in order to be effective organizationally in driving these down.”

For Canadian occupational health and safety leaders, the ISN findings – though based on U.S. data – underline familiar themes: transportation, falls, mobile equipment and machine hazards remain stubborn killers. As organizations refine their own SIF and potential SIF programs, the report suggests that success will depend less on further reducing minor injuries and more on relentlessly targeting the high‑energy exposures that turn routine work into life‑changing events.