LTIFR, LTIIR and Severity Rates

Calculating Common Safety Indicators

Knowing how to calculate LTIFR and other safety

indicators is an important skill to have if you work in the health and safety field. Despite these
not revealing a great deal of useful information, managers love them and will insist on knowing
what they are. They will use them to measure internal health and safety performance and to
compare your companys performance with other companies.
Commonly used safety indicators such as the LTIFR are not difficult to calculate and this is even
easier if you use a spread sheet.

Health and Safety Indicators

Broadly speaking, there are two types of common health and safety indicators frequency rates
such as the LTIFR and incidence rates such as the LTIIR. So whats the difference?
A frequency rate shows how many events happened over a given period by a standardised
number of hours worked. An incidence rate is how many events happened over a given period
time by a standardised number of employees (usually lower than the standardised number of
hours). For example, the LTIFR which stands for Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate, is how many
Lost Time Injuries (LTI) occurred over a specified period per 1 000 000 or 100 000 (or some
other number) hours worked in that period. This could be over a month or a quarter or a year
depending on the reporting requirements of your business. To convert this to an incidence rate
just substitute the number of employees for the number of hours.

These formulas are used to calculate other safety indicators as well as LTIFR there are Medical
Treatment Injuries (MTI), another is significant injuries which are often categorized as LTIs plus
MTIs. A slight variation is the severity rate which is usually a measure of the amount of time lost
due to work related injury divided by the number of LTIs to produce and average amount of lost
time. This is often called the severity rate.

Calculating LTIFR Rates

The formula to calculate LTIFR is really very simple. Lets say we want to know how many lost
time injuries per 1 000 000 hours worked there were for the last year. You need to get two pieces
of information the number of LTIs that happened in the last year and the number of hours
worked in the last year. You could probably get the number of LTIs from your workers
compensation claims manager or insurance company and your payroll section should be able to
tell you the number of hours worked over the period.
Multiply the number of LTIs by 1 000 000 and divide the result by the number of hours worked
and there you have it the LTIFR. To show it using numbers. Say there were 7 LTIs in the past
year and 2 451 679 hours worked. So, 7 X 1 000 000 = 7 000 000. Divide that by 2 451 679 and
you get 2.86 go on, grab your calculator and try for yourself.
What does that mean? It means that this business experienced 2.86 LTIs for every 1 000 000
hours worked over the past year.

Calculating Incidence Rates

Now, to calculate the LTIIR (Lost Time Injury Incidence Rate) which is the number of LTIs per
100 (or whatever figure you want) employees we just substitute the number of employees for the
number of hours and multiply the number of LTIs by a standardizing factor which is 100.
So say this mythical business had 791 employees, we get 7 X 100 = 700. Divide this by the
number of employees (791) and we get 0.88. So for every 100 employees this firm experienced
0.88 LTIs.

Calculating Severity Rates

Finally the severity rate. Depending on how this is expressed you will need at least the
information from above and the number of work days lost over the year. Your claims Manager
should be able to provide the information but lets say its 73. Most often the severity rate is
expressed as an average by simply dividing the number of days lost by the number of LTIs. So,
using the figures we have we get 73 divided by 7 which gives 10.43. That is, on average each
LTI will result in 10.5 days off work. This can be converted to a frequency or incidence rate by
multiplying the result by a standardizing factor. This, of course will increase the result which is
why you dont see it very often who wants a severity rate of 104 days off per 100 LTIs?

So there you have it. Not very hard and if you know even a bit about spreadsheets you can easily
insert the formulas into specific cells to calculate these indicators automatically.