Mercer Peace River Celebrates Outstanding Safety Performance

Health and safety are our top values at Mercer Peace River (MPR), located in Peace River, Alberta, Canada. In the last 18 months, MPR has taken a journey to enhance its focus on health and safety, and the results have been extremely successful. We are very excited to share that the MPR team has maintained a TRIR below 2 for all of 2023. In early 2022, MPR’s rolling TRIR hovered around 7. This outstanding accomplishment is a reflection of the outstanding commitment to safety shared by MPR team members. 

What is the TRIR?

The Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) is a measure of occupational health and safety based on the number of safety incidents reported. That number is weighted against the number of workers injured and the number of hours worked. 

MPR’s rolling TRIR is currently sitting at 1.25 TRIR. Although this is a low number considering the size of our facility, we remain committed to the continuous improvement of our health and safety program. Our goal is ZERO HARM to our team members and to ensure that everyone on our work site goes home safely at the end of every shift. We look forward to continuing this trend and achieving a TRIR of less than 1 in the future.

Leading Indicators vs. Lagging Indicators

With the roll out of MPR’s new Mission Zero safety program, we consciously chose to add more “antecedents” to increase and improve safe behaviours. As part of this change, we moved our focus from lagging indicators to leading indicators. A lagging indicator for Mission Zero would be the measurement of our safety program. In this case, the TRIR is a lagging indicator: an important indicator for management stewardship but for front line workers, it is too late to influence the outcome. The team member has already been injured. Leading indicators for Mission Zero would include the behaviours needed to improve our TRIR. In this case, the leading indicators would be increased safety flashes, safety recognitions, FLRAs, Safe Work Plans, Worksite Inspections, Safe Work/Hot Work Permits, Morning Toolbox Talks and team member/leader interactions. If we want to create an environment where everyone goes home safely every shift, then we need to put more emphasis on setting workers up for success to avoid serious injuries. The best way to measure how safe we are is not by the “absence of injuries”, but rather the “presence of the controls” meant to avoid serious injury.

By bringing our focus to the leading indicators to benefit everyone’s safety, a number of changes were made including: new safety meeting templates that encourage safety recognitions and enhanced conversations about safety, ambitious safety Key Performance Indicators like achieving a TRIR <2, and more clearly defining roles in the Roles and Responsibilities Standard. All of these leading indicators have made safety more visible throughout the work day. We are confident that these changes will have incredible positive impacts on the safety of our people.

Safety Challenge 

We challenge everyone reading this to please ask yourselves how you can enhance safety in your own lives. By taking personal responsibility for your health and safety, you can prevent yourself or your loved ones from getting injured. As a community, we encourage everyone to take proactive measures to prevent injuries, so everyone can go home safely to their families.