ANNA JEAN WIRTH, TOM LaTOURRETTE, PEYTON MILLER, DULANI WOODS, TIM CONLEY
Incorporating Readiness
Considerations into Mishap
Classification and Analysis
W
orkplace accidents that result in injury or property damage have several negative
impacts on organizations. These impacts include the costs associated with medical care,
equipment repair, and extra personnel to replace injured workers; negative reputational
impacts of failing to keep workers safe, such as competitive disadvantage and lower
worker morale; and decreased productivity and profit (e.g., Boden, Biddle, and Spieler, 2001; Kabir,
KEY FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
■ The safety community views mishap cost as being deficient at conveying the severity of a
mishap because of the strong relationship between mishap cost and the overall cost of the
equipment involved.
■ The data collected on mishaps do not support understanding the readiness impact of mis-
haps because they lack the operational context.
■ The Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Force Safety and Occupational Health (FSOH)
should consider augmenting mishap data to support contextualizing mishaps with readiness
impact and use this additional information to augment ongoing mishap trend analysis.
■ If minimizing the level of effort for data integration is essential, FSOH should consider augment-
ing mishap data with fields that identify the criticality of equipment and personnel involved.
■ If a more nuanced analysis of potential readiness trends resulting from mishaps is desired,
FSOH should consider augmenting mishap data with fields that allow the computation of
changes in readiness metrics in the Defense Readiness Reporting System.
■ Because of the implementation challenges and potential cost implications of augmenting
mishap data, FSOH should consider a pilot analysis that assembles mishap data with the
additional data needed to estimate the readiness impact of mishaps to further evaluate the
feasibility and analytic benefit of making such an investment.
■ If incorporating the readiness impact within the existing mishap classification structure is a
long-term goal, FSOH should first incorporate measures that capture the readiness impact of
mishaps and use those data to assess the potential increase in the investigation and report-
ing burden on the services as various thresholds for the readiness impact are considered.
Research Report
