OSHA's New Injury Reporting Rule Now In Effect

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration's (OSHA) new injury reporting rule took effect on January 1, 2015. If you're an employer, you should familiarize yourself with the changes made to this rule. Failure to follow the new guidelines could result in fines or other penalties.

Up until now, employers were only required to report fatalities and injuries involving three or more workers. As of January 1st, however, all fatalities, injuries that require hospitalization (regardless of how many workers it affects), injuries resulting in amputation, and injuries resulting in the loss of an eye must be reported to OSHA.

Time is of the essence when reporting work-related injuries and fatalities. The new OSHA rule requires employers to report all fatalities within 8 hours and all injuries requiring hospitalization and/or involving amputation or eye loss within 24 hours. The report should contain the name of the business, location where the incident took place, exact time of the incident, type of incident (fatality, amputation injury, eye loss, etc.), number of workers affected by the incident, a person of contact and his or her phone number, description of how the incident occurred.

So, what prompted OSHA to change its decades-old injury reporting rule? Officials say the change was made to improve the accuracy of its work-related fatalities and injuries data. If employers aren't legally required to report injuries, there's no incentive for them to do so. And this translates into less accurate data. By tweaking the rule to cover more injuries, OSHA hopes to better identify problematic sectors and industries.

"OSHA’s updated recordkeeping rule expands the list of severe injuries that all
employers must report to OSHA. Establishments located in states under Federal OSHA jurisdiction must begin to comply with the new requirements on January 1, 2015," wrote OSHA.

OSHA offers the following three ways to report a work-related injury:

1. Contact or visit a local OSHA office in your respective area (you can find OSHA offices by visiting https://www.osha.gov/html/RAmap.html).
2. Call the OSHA hotline at 800-321-OSHA.
3. Report the incident online at www.osha.gov/report_online.