SIF Precursor Prevention And safety outcomes

  • Serious Injuries & Fatalities (SIFs) remain one of the biggest challenges in safety performance. While many organisations track injuries and near misses, research shows that SIF events follow a different pattern — and often have distinct precursors that appear long before an incident escalates.
  • A Serious Injury or Fatality (SIF) is any event that results in life-altering harm or death, or had the potential to do so. Unlike minor injuries, SIFs are usually linked to:
  • high-energy sources (mechanical, electrical, gravitational, chemical)
  • breakdown of critical controls
  • work environments with little margin for error
CARE helps teams identify these SIF precursors at the point of work, ensuring critical controls are visible, verified, and effective.

Why SIF Prevention Requires a Different Approach

  • Traditional safety metrics often show improvements in minor injuries, while SIF rates remain unchanged.
  • Industry research (Mercer / BST, 2021) found that:
  • ~21% of SIF events can be traced back to 13 recurring high-risk scenarios
  • Many SIF precursors are visible during planning and at the start of work
  • Most SIF events had weak or missing critical controls, not “unsafe behaviours”
SIF prevention is not about more forms. It’s about focusing attention on the few things that control significant energy and risk.

The High-Risk Scenarios Behind Most SIF Events

Multiple global studies including the Mercer/BST SIF Causation Model (2021) show that serious injuries and fatalities are driven by a limited number of recurring high-risk scenarios, regardless of industry. These scenarios consistently involve high-energy sources (mechanical, electrical, chemical, gravitational) and failures in critical controls.
The IOGP Safety Leaders Group was among the first to formalise this insight by defining 13 High-Risk Scenarios for their sector. These scenarios are widely referenced across industries because they capture the most common SIF exposure patterns found in high-energy operations.
CARE incorporates these scenarios as a domain-agnostic foundation, with optional industry-specific add-ons for sectors such as automotive, construction, logistics, and aviation.
CARE helps organisations shift from counting injuries to predicting and preventing SIF events before they occur.By focusing on precursors and critical controls, teams can stop hazards from escalating — and protect the people who face the highest risks every day.