A SIF prevention maturity model is a staged framework describing how an organisation moves from reacting to serious injuries and fatalities after they happen toward finding and controlling SIF exposure before anyone is hurt. Early stages rely on lagging data such as recordable injuries and investigations. Middle stages add precursor identification and near-miss data. Later stages measure exposure continuously, rank it by severity, and apply engineering controls where the potential for serious harm is highest. There is no single agreed model: consultancies, insurers and safety programs publish their own stage names, so it is a planning tool rather than a standard.
The full guide is SIF prevention for forklift fleets, which describes the move from detection to exposure measurement to control. A maturity model is useful for an honest self-assessment and for a roadmap that ties each stage to concrete capabilities. For forklift operations, the questions at each step are whether serious-potential events are identified separately from minor ones, whether exposure is measured, for example as pedestrian-truck interactions per operating hour, rather than estimated, and whether controls follow the hierarchy of controls, with separation and engineering ahead of signs and training. Reaching a later stage is not a promise of fewer injuries; it changes what the site can see and act on.