Days Since Last LTI: Metric or Vanity Number?

The board in the main corridor reads 847. Eight hundred and forty-seven days since the last lost-time injury. The site manager is quietly proud of it. The safety manager checks it every morning. And on the shop floor, nobody can tell you what happened 848 days ago or what changed afterwards.

That is the problem with the LTI counter in a single sentence.

What the counter actually measures

The days-since-last-LTI clock measures one thing: the absence of a recordable event. It does not measure how close you came to one yesterday. It does not measure whether the near-miss your fitter had in the press shop got written up or quietly forgotten. It measures luck as much as it measures effort, and on a low-volume site, it can run for years without telling you anything useful at all.

That does not mean you should stop recording lost-time injuries. You absolutely should. But treating the counter as a proxy for safety performance is a category error, and it encourages the wrong behaviours. When a number on a board represents management approval, people find ways to keep the number moving in the right direction, and that is not always the same as making the workplace safer.

The gamification problem

Talk to enough site safety managers and you will hear the same story in different clothes. Someone trips, sprains their wrist, could plausibly take a few days off. The pressure, sometimes spoken and sometimes not, is to keep them on light duties so the counter keeps ticking. The injury is recorded, the restrictions are managed, but the investigation into why the trip happened gets half an hour and a filed form.

The number stays high. The hazard stays in place.

This is not a criticism of the people involved. It is a predictable consequence of treating a lagging indicator as the headline metric. You get what you measure, and if what you measure is the absence of a bad outcome, you will manage absence rather than risk.

What to track instead

None of this means abandoning injury data. Lost-time rates, RIDDOR reportables, first-aid cases: all of them belong in your monitoring. The question is what sits alongside them.

Leading indicators are the answer everyone reaches for, and the concept is sound, but the execution often is not. A near-miss count that lives in a spreadsheet nobody reads is no better than the LTI counter. The value is in closure rates: how quickly hazards raised get resolved, and at what level.

A few things worth tracking consistently:

Near-miss reporting rate, normalised by headcount. If it drops, either your workplace got dramatically safer or people stopped reporting. One of those is more likely.

Corrective action close-out rate within 30 days. Raised is not the same as fixed. A site that raises 50 near-misses and closes 48 within a month is in a meaningfully different place from one that raises 50 and closes 12.

Repeat incident categories. If slips, trips and falls appear in your incident log three months in a row, something structural is not being addressed. Categorise your incidents and look at the pattern, not just the count.

Observation frequency. How often are supervisors actually walking the floor with safety eyes on? Not formal audits as events, but routine, informal observation built into the working day.

None of these require specialist software. A simple tracking sheet, reviewed weekly, tells you far more than a counter on a wall.

The counter is not worthless

To be clear: reaching 500 days without a lost-time injury is a genuine achievement on a busy production site. It reflects real effort from real people and it is worth acknowledging. The problem is not celebrating the milestone. The problem is treating it as the goal, and treating a high number as evidence that your safety management is working.

A site can run 1,000 days without an LTI and still have a serious incident waiting to happen. The counter does not see that. Your near-miss data, your observation rounds, and your close-out rates do.

Fitting it into your wider lean work

Safety data sits alongside your broader operational metrics, and the same rigour you bring to OEE or scrap rates applies here. Unplanned stoppages and safety incidents often share root causes: rushed changeovers, deferred maintenance, cluttered workstations. Your 5S audit score is not just a housekeeping metric, it is a leading safety indicator, and if your programme has drifted into a monthly checkbox exercise, https://5s.cadencestandard.com has a more structured approach that keeps it alive between audits.

If you want to see how safety events connect to your wider loss picture, https://losses.cadencestandard.com is worth an hour of your time. The patterns are usually there once you look for them.

The days-since counter can stay on the wall. Just make sure it is not the only thing you are reading.