Discover how Heinrich's Pyramid assists in the prevention of workplace accidents within the production line!

Have you ever imagined yourself working in a company that did not offer you safety? Imagine that you are going to perform activities at work with the risk of ending up in a hospital, how would you feel?

Workplace safety is very important for any kind of company, and that is why the studies on this topic are only growing. Within this context, Heinrich's Pyramid is fundamental to understand how to prevent accidents and ensure productivity and quality in its processes and products.

Most of these accidents occur because of the carelessness of the employees or the lack of conditions that should be provided by the companies.

If you are interested in changing your company’s scenario, this article was made for you! We will help you to know where to start.

In this article you will learn:

• What is Heinrich's Pyramid?
• What are Heinrich's main theories and their importance?
• What is the Bird's Pyramid?
• What is the Pyramid of Deviations?
• What do they have in common and which one should I use?

The Heinrich Pyramid, or also known as bird or deviation, is a tool that serves to quantify safety abnormalities, and allows you to monitor these events by severity level and compare them over time. In addition, Heinrich's Pyramid classifies these events into levels of severity.

This tool aims to reduce accidents in a progressive way, but unlike what you may be imagining, problems do not start being attacked from one end, but from both ends in a parallel way!

The pyramid of Heinrich is considered one of the main tools in the implementation of the technical pillar of safety of World Class Manufacturing, one of the most modern methodologies of continuous improvement.

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What are Heinrich's main theories and their importance?

Herbert William Heinrich is considered a pioneer in occupational safety studies and brought a lot of background for these studies to be improved and implemented within organizations.

In his work Industrial Accident Prevention, published in the 1930s, Heinrich argued that every accident has one or more causes. This seems a bit obvious, doesn't it?

However, this served as a kick-start for his analyses of accidents that occurred in companies and thus, to build two theories that were very important for the reduction of accidents.

1. Domino Theory

It's nice to see the domino effect, isn't it? Not when it comes to occupational safety!

Heinrich explains how accidents are caused within companies, and with that, how to look for ways to prevent any accident from occurring.

In this theory, the accident is represented by five pieces of dominoes, positioned in such a way that when the first one falls, the others will fall in sequence.

This analogy is important for us to understand the causes of an accident and seek to eliminate any risk, through Heinrich's Pyramid. The pieces are defined as:

1. Genetic Inheritance

It refers to the inherited or developed behaviors of people in the work environment.

2. Failure of people

This piece concerns bad behaviors, such as inattention, violence, or the act of not caring about safety practices, and others.

3. Unsafe Act

These failures by people eventually lead to unsafe acts, increasing mechanical or physical risks.

4. Accident

The combination of unsafe activities with physical and mechanical risks generates an increased chance of an accident occurring.

5. Injury

Injuries result from accidents and can reach different levels of severity, such as fractures or injuries to the worker's body.

You are probably wondering what this has to do with Heinrich's Pyramid, right? Don't worry, I'll explain it to you.

These concepts were fundamental to analyze work-related accidents and thus to conclude their studies and results as Heinrich's Pyramid.

2. Heinrich's Pyramid Theory

Are you interested to know how the Heinrich Pyramid tool used in continuous improvement came about? How did it become so famous? Or why is it so important for the implementation of safety in organizations? Read on, and I'll tell you all about it.

Heinrich carried out more than 70 thousand analyses of work accidents and came to the conclusion that every 1 (one) serious injury or accident with death corresponds to 29 light injuries and 300 accidents without injuries.

The pyramid shows the work accidents with and without injuries, and can be interpreted as the occurrences of abnormalities derived from the acts of insecurity present in the organizations.

Therefore, from its studies arose the need for companies to worry about the prevention of these accidents, discussing employees' attitudes, skills and knowledge. Besides this, the precariousness of the work also entered this agenda.

You must have noticed that the concept of Heinrich's Pyramid presented in the first topic has a slightly different approach from your theory, right? Upstairs I said it was an application tool and here it is the result of a study.

This happened because many years passed and its studies were perfected, taking other names and applications. Let's get to know the main ones, the Bird's Pyramid and the Divergence Pyramid.

What is the Bird's pyramid?

Bird's pyramid appeared almost 30 years after Heinrich's pyramid and got its name from its creator, Frank Bird Jr:

• Information
• Research
• Analysis
• Process Review

His study involved more than 90 thousand accident analyses, but in the published work only 1750 thousand were considered, in more than 290 companies, and he concluded that the less serious accidents should be avoided so that the more serious ones do not occur.

His pyramid resulted in the proportion that every 1 accident with death or serious injury corresponded to 100 minor injuries and 500 accidents without injuries. Furthermore, Bird went beyond the analysis involving accidents involving people and studied the property losses caused by these events as well.

We are not done yet, the last pyramid is missing, the pyramid of deviations. You can find these different names to represent each of them, so let's understand the last one.

What is the pyramid of deviations?

You know Dupont? That company was also responsible for the creation of nylon, a material widely used in household appliances, for guitar string or fishing line. So this same company also invested in studies in work safety and created the pyramid of deviations.

Heinrich and Bird focused their studies on losses that could generate compensation for companies. Dupont went further, and besides considering losses, it generated efforts to focus on risk prevention.

In view of this, the pyramid got even bigger, considering deviations in the proportion that for every one fatal accident, there were 30 accidents with lost time, 300 accidents without lost time, 3 thousand incidents, and 30 thousand deviations.

After all, what can we conclude about the three pyramids and which one should I use to ensure accident reduction in companies?

What do they have in common, and which one should I use?

First of all, you can see that from one pyramid to the next, the proportion increases by a factor of 10, and the pyramid bands also increase. This means that they have started to consider more criteria to classify the severity of accidents, and this is very important to know how to attack each of the bands.

For you to apply the concepts that you have learned here in companies, it is necessary to consider that each company has its own particularities, so you must create your own parameters and analyze the accidents in each range of the pyramid.

But it is worth pointing out that after having Heinrich's Pyramid elaborated according to your company's analysis, it is necessary to attack the two extremities at the same time and in a progressive way.

Now it's up to you! 

In this article you have learned all the theory of the heinrich pyramids and understood their importance to ensure safety within the workplace.

Applying improvements in all processes aimed at preventing risks to the worker's health is essential for the quality and growth of the company.

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