Introduction to Health and Safety at Work

4.3.2
Important indicators of a health and 
safety culture
There are several outputs or indicators of the state of the 
health and safety culture of an organization. The most 
important are the numbers of accidents, near misses 
and occupational ill-health cases occurring within the 
organization.
While the number of accidents may give a general 
indication of the health and safety culture, a more 
detailed examination of accidents and accident statistics 
is normally required. A calculation of the rate of accidents 
enables health and safety performance to be compared 
between years and organizations.
The simplest measure of accident rate is called the 
incident rate and is defi ned as:
Total number of accidents
Number of persons e
employed
⫻
1000
or the total number of accidents per 1000 employees.
A similar measure (per 100 000) is used by the HSC 
in its annual report on national accident statistics and 
enables comparisons to be made within an organiza-
tion between time periods when employee numbers may 
change. It also allows comparisons to be made with the 
national occupational or industrial group relevant to the 
organization.
There are four main problems with this measure 
which must be borne in mind when it is used. These are:
➤
there may be a considerable variation over a time 
period in the ratio of part-time to full-time employees
➤
the measure does not differentiate between major 
and minor accidents and takes no account of other 
incidents, such as those involving damage but no 
injury (although it is possible to calculate an inci-
dence rate for a particular type or cause of accident)
➤
there may be signifi cant variations in work activity 
during the periods being compared
➤
under-reporting of accidents will affect the accuracy 
of the data.
Subject to the above limitations, an organization with 
a high accident incidence rate is likely to have a negative 
or poor health and safety culture.
There are other indications of a poor health and 
safety culture or climate. These include:
➤
a high sickness, ill-health and absentee rate amongst 
the workforce
➤
the perception of a blame culture
➤
high staff turnover leading to a loss of momentum in 
making health and safety improvements
➤
no resources (in terms of budget, people or facil-
ities) made available for the effective management 
of health and safety

---