How to Reduce Employee Injuries

Employers, managers and supervisors all play an integral part in reducing injuries to their workforce. With a little bit of determination, you can avoid the risk of injury due to unsafe work practices.

Review any first aid logs or incident reports. Pay particular attention to first aid reports as they are a great place to identify incidents involving minor medical issues that could have more serious injury potentials. Incident reports also provide a great source of information as it relates to what is referred to as, "Close calls and near misses". These are accidents or injuries that, "Almost" happened but did not result in injury or damage.

Your checklist should be simple with a logical organization for your injuries.

Create a list of injuries that have occurred at your work site. List your injuries in generic headings such as; 1. Back strains and sprains, 2. Repetitive motion, slips, trips & falls, crushing, heat or cold injuries, etc.

Include dates, times, shifts and departments in your lists if possible. This information will prove handy in identifying injury trending patterns and red flags that you'll what to pay attention to, such as did the injury get reported after the employees time off. This could indicate that the employee was injured outside of work and is attempting to claim it as work related.

Review this injury log to identify the OSHA recordable injuries sustained by your workforce.

Take a few minutes to review your company's OSHA 300 Injury and Illness logs for the past three years. You may also be able to request risk management reports from your workers' compensation insurance carrier.

Identify root cause(s) by asking,

Next, look at each injury and incident individually. Begin asking yourself, "Why?" Let's look at an example. An employee slipped and fell in the warehouse causing a back injury. Why did the employee slip? He was walking through a small puddle of water on the floor and he slipped. Why was there a small puddle of water on the floor? There's an overhead water pipe that's had a little leak in it forever, it's no big deal. Why wasn't the water leak fixed? The example could go on further of course, but I'm sure you get the point. Asking the "Why" question helps you get at the Root Cause of the incident.

Collecting injury data in this way helps clarify the problem.

After completing the steps above, you should begin seeing some general trends begin to appear in your results. What are your predominant injuries? What are the days, times and shifts with the highest injury rates?

Difficulty: Moderately Easy