Every safety-mature organisation counts investigations. Almost none can answer the question a board actually needs answered: are they any good? Completion is countable; quality traditionally lives in the judgement of whoever reads the report, which means it isn't governed at scale. The fix is to compute quality from the investigation records themselves.
IQS: Investigation Quality Score
IQS scores each completed investigation on the discipline the method demands: evidence coverage across the PEEPO categories, timeline depth, contributing factors spanning the ICAM families rather than clustering on individual actions, systemic reach (factors and fixes landing at defences and organisational factors, DF and OFT, not just retraining), and recommendation traceability. A rising IQS means the method is being practised, not just referenced. A pattern of factors clustering at IT with no OFT depth is visible immediately. That's blame culture showing up as data.
ACR: Action Closure Reliability
Findings only matter if actions close. ACR measures whether corrective actions close on time, with verification evidence, and at a meaningful level of the hierarchy of controls. It's the difference between "we raised 40 actions" and "our actions reliably become verified change", and it exposes the quiet failure mode where everything closes as an administrative control, on paper, late.
CHI: Control Health Index
Investigations keep discovering the same truth: the barrier everyone assumed was in place wasn't. CHI tracks the state of critical controls across sites (in place, verified, effective) refreshed by live data from investigations and control assessments, so control degradation is a monitored signal instead of a post-incident finding.
Why indices beat reading reports
- Trend, not anecdote: quality moves visibly quarter on quarter
- Comparable across sites and teams, so coaching lands where it's needed
- Leading, not lagging: a falling ACR predicts trouble before recurrence does
- Board-ready: governance conversations run on evidence rather than sampled reports
SafetyPulse computes these indices natively from every investigation: nothing extra to fill in. New organisations see each index unlock as the underlying data arrives: the first signed-off investigation starts IQS; the first corrective actions raised and closed start ACR. From there, safety governance has numbers.