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Serious workplace injuries a $1B per week burden in US, research says

February 16th, 2017 by Dakota Software Staff Industry News

Serious workplace injuries a $1B per week burden in US, research says

Serious injuries in the workplace have plenty of negative consequences. Employees suffer significant harm and may have to spend weeks or months recovering. Meanwhile, the business loses a trusted worker and may suffer from disruptions and inefficiencies. Additionally, regulatory agencies like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration may conduct inspections and issue significant fines and other corrective actions following such an incident.

The Liberty Mutual Research Institute recently released its 2017 Workplace Safety Index, which provides a ranking of the most common serious, nonfatal workplace injuries across the U.S. Beyond providing a breakdown of such incidents at workplaces, the report also included the financial burden associated with serious, nonfatal injuries. The total price comes out to roughly $60 billion, meaning such injuries cost the business world more than $1 billion per week.

The most common serious workplace injuries
While there are a wide variety of significant injuries that employees can suffer while on the job, just three categories comprise approximately half of all such harm:

  • Overexertion involving outside sources is by far the most common serious injury, accounting for 23 percent of all incidents and costing businesses more than $13 billion per year. The phrase is inclusive of a variety of injuries that involve moving , using or otherwise interacting with an object or tool.
  • Falls on same level cost business about $10.6 billion per year and represent 17.7 percent of all serious, nonfatal workplace injuries.
  • Falls to a lower level are about half as common as those on the same level, responsible for 9.2 percent of serious workplace harm and costing $5.5 billion per year.

Other common injuries in the top 10, in order of ranking, are employees struck by an object or equipment, other exertions or bodily reactions, roadway incidents involving a motorized land vehicle, slipping and tripping without falling, part of a worker's body caught in or compressed by machinery or objects, struck against objects or equipment and repetitive motions involving micro-tasks.

As EHS Today pointed out, these 10 categories represent a strong majority of all such injuries. Businesses can use the research conducted by Liberty Mutual to focus EHS and health and safety programs around the issues most likely to occur, with the intent to limit or eliminate these pervasive problems.

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