Focusing Industry Learning on Prevention of Fatalities and Life-Changing Injuries

The International Association of Oil and Gas Producers (IOGP) Safety Committee work is focused on the elimination of fatalities in our industry. To support this effort, an Expert Group was formed to develop definitions for new industry metrics focused on what matters most; the prevention of fatalities and life-changing injuries. In 2022 IOGP published definitions for actual, potential and near miss Fatality and Permanent Impairment (FPI) injuries. Different approaches for significant HSE incident metrics are in use and being developed across the industry. This causes confusion, lack of standardization, and ultimately difficulty in identifying focused learning and efforts to improve. The FPI Expert Group combined practices and resources to develop a standard definition for permanent impairment injuries. Combined with the fatality definition this will help us focus on the most critical learning for the prevention of fatalities and permanent impairments. IOGP has engaged with other industry associations to collaborate in the development and use of the FPI definition, with the aim of having an industry wide metric. Historical data has been used previously to focus interventions to reduce fatalities. This work expands that scope to prevention of life-changing injuries, also referred to as permanent impairment injuries. Using IOGP Member Company good practice, the FPI Expert Group has developed a comprehensive definition for actual fatality and permanent impairment injuries, and guidance for the determination of potential and near miss fatal and permanent impairment injuries. With medical expert support from the IOGP-Ipieca Health Committee, a comprehensive set of case study examples has been produced to support the actual permanent impairment definitions. The focus of the FPI Expert Group is on extracting industry level learning for the prevention of fatalities and permanent impairment injuries. 2022 actual FPI data was collected, with excellent levels of participation by IOGP member companies. The submitted data aligned well with the definition. As this was the first year of reporting, participants were encouraged to provide feedback to enable the Expert Group to continuously update the reporting guidance. The majority of the feedback requested additional guidance to identify and learn from potential or near miss FPI. This paper will describe the development of the definition, and present the findings and lessons learned from this process and from the information submitted.