Costs of Accidents, Incidents, Downtime and Claims
The costs of health and safety management system failures are already high and continue to rise at alarming rates. The reasons for the rise are many and include leaner workforces (less capacity to tolerate absences), high cost of replacement labour (particularly skilled), reduced customer tolerance to sub-standard performance, growth of a "claims culture", rising fines for breaches of safety legislation, high claims settlement figures, rising insurance premiums....etc.
The results of these failures can include occupational diseases (dermatitis, cancers, asthma) occupational ill-health (back pains, upper limb disorders, stress) and injuries (eye damage, fractures, cuts) any of which can result in valuable employees being absent from work, build up a resentment to you as employer and be less productive.
Whilst the costs of failures continue to rise, astute employers have realised that if the incidents are prevented from occurring, the costs of prevention almost always vastly outweigh those related to treatment of the loss after the event. Even the post-accident costs can be minimised through a sensible approach to the subject.
The LRS approach to this is multi-faceted: programmes to identify, measure and control workplace safety and occupational health risks, identification and quantification of potential public and products liability risks and development of suitable controls, a robust accident/incident/near-miss reporting, recording, investigation and analysis programme, absence management programmes, early return to work, rehabilitation, partnership with and provision of accurate risk information to insurers/brokers, including accurate claims reserving.
This combined approach links the prevention efforts with accident management along with creating an insurer partnership.