The Actual Cost of Incidents/Accidents

One is generally mislead by thinking that once an incident or accident occurs, the only cost incurred is to repair the damage to equipment/property and/or the treatment of the injury that was sustained. However, there is a lot more hidden costs involved due to an accident or injury, that one rarely tend to think of, and that is often difficult to quantify. These subsequent costs or harm can very easily be considerably more than the initial cost of the accident or incident, and we often neglect this, to our own detriment. 

The sad part (and good news), is that one can easily prevent considerable losses to your business by only applying even basic risk management measures. Often, big disaster could have been prevented by putting in place simple measures without spending a lot of money. 

Think of the following consequential cost that can be incurred, or harm that can be sustained to the business, as a result of an accident or incident: 

•      Lost time / delays 

•      Product, raw material damage/loss due to time loss/delays 

•      Loss in production, both due to a worker not there to produce, and/or due to time lost as a result of an accident/injury (e.g. time to attend to the actual accident/injury, time for cleaning up the site after an accident/injury, time that the business/production line is put on a halt to carry out legal investigations, etc.) 

•      Cost of temporary workers that needs to be appointed in place of an injured/sick worker, and/or overtime that needs to be worked by the remaining workforce to do the work of an injured/sick worker 

•      Sick leave pay 

•      Cost to clean up site 

•      Cost/time for investigation 

•      Fines imposed due to negligence on behalf of the employer, that resulted in an accident/injury 

•      Legal costs that the business might incur (e.g. court case) 

•      Excess to be paid on any insurance claim 

•      Increased insurance premiums 

•      Loss in reputation of the business 

•      Loss of contracts 

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