• There are two types of measurements for safety, leading indicators and lagging or trailing indicators.

Here’s a topic that goes hand-in-hand with program evaluation: measuring safety. How do we do it? What should we be measuring? There are essentially two types of measurements or metrics. There are leading indicators and lagging or trailing indicators.

• Lagging indicators are those things we look at after an injury or incident has already occurred. The common one is incidence rate or DART rate (DART refers to cases with Days Away from work or with Restricted duty or Transfer). There’s nothing necessarily wrong with using lagging indicators if they are then complemented with other measurements. In particular, upper management may be interested in some of the incident rate metrics, and they do have a place, particularly if they are descriptive enough to give results at the department level and if they can be tied to causes of injuries. But employers should really consider moving toward leading indicators.
• Leading indicators are activities that occur prior to an incident ever occurring. They are those activities that occur in attempts to try to head off injuries.