Refocusing Safety Metrics: Making Fatalities and Permanent Impairments the Benchmark for True Safety Performance

The process of switching over from TRIR to FPIR based system for safety performance evaluation is studied with respect to various safety parameters of different Oil and Gas industry majors such as ADNOC, Shell, Chevron, and Eni. The safety parameters studied include the Near Miss, Potential Incidents and injury rates in addition to fatalities. The awareness of keeping Health, Safety, Environment (HSE) over the operational goals of an organization slowly picked up momentum across the globe with due sustainability into consideration. The data with respect to TRIR and FPIR is studied and found that over the past decades, the oil and gas industry has made remarkable strides in improving occupational safety, notably reflected by a consistent decline in Total Recordable Injury Rates (TRIR). Data from the IOGP 2023f report demonstrates that TRIR has reached historically low levels across the upstream sector. However, the rate of Fatalities and Permanent Impairments (FPI) has remained a persistent concern. Analysis of ADNOC Group data between 2020 and 2024 similarly shows that while recordable incidents have significantly reduced, the occurrence of Fatalities and Permanent Impairments remains unstable. This paper argues that TRIR is no longer a sufficient proxy for safety performance excellence. Because the TRIR is based on the incidents counting without considering severity, it is estimated that TRIR may not be sufficient to address the safety scenario of performance of an Industry. Instead, industry benchmarking should shift towards FPI-focused metrics to drive the elimination of life-changing and life-ending events. Comparative analysis of industry and ADNOC trends is presented, culminating in a proposed data-driven framework to prioritize FPI as the primary safety performance benchmark. The industry level safety performance coupled with performance of ADNOC has proved that the drift towards FPIR will be more effective to assess the safety performance of an industry rather than TRIR based safety performance. This has been effectively demonstrated in this paper. In initial stage of switch over from TRIR to FPIR has some amount of reluctant adoption at various levels in oil and gas industry it has been gaining its strength to make FIPR as the basis for safety performance evaluation.