How to Calculate Your OSHA Injury Rate - YouTube

Hey everybody, welcome to The Safety Tribe YouTube series.

My name is Ron and today we're going to talk about how to do your total recordable injury

rate calculation.

Your total recordable injury rate calculation is a simple mathematical calculation that

calculates an index that every business in the United States uses so that you can take

one business and compare it to another business and kind of see where either injury rate lies.

You can see whether this industry or this business has fewer or more injuries than another

business.

So to make this calculation, you need two things, two pieces of information.

The first piece of information is you need to know how many OSHA recordable injuries

that your company sustained during the previous period.

Now the previous period is nearly always the previous calendar year.

So, in the previous calendar year, how many OSHA recordable injuries did you have?

An OSHA recordable injury, to make this description short, is an injury that OSHA calls beyond

first aid.

That would mean stitches, that would mean getting a prescription for antibiotic or painkillers,

a fracture, a hospital stay, or maybe if a person was injured so bad they couldn't come

to work or couldn't come to work at full duty.

Those kind of injuries are called OSHA recordable injuries.

First aid injuries, like a papercut, you get a papercut, you put some ointment on it, wrap

a bandaid on it and you're done.

Those kind of injuries, first aid injuries, do not belong in this list.

They don't belong in this number.

Only OSHA recordable injuries are being considered here.

The next thing you need to know is you need to know how many total hours were worked by

all your employees during the previous period.

Once again, that's usually during the previous calendar year.

Now that includes the number of hours worked by weekly or hourly people, it also includes

the number of hours worked by salary people.

The way this is generally done, you go to the previous year's payroll if you're talking

about annually and you look at how many hourly hours were paid for during the previous year.

And it doesn't matter if one employee worked 1,000 hours or if he worked 10 hours, you

just add those number of hours, however many they were, you add those up and that's the

hourly part of it.

Then you take the number of salaried individuals and you take for example if there's 10 salaried

individuals, you take that each of them works an average of 2,000 hours per year, so 10

x 2,000 that would be 20,000 salary hours per year.

You add the salaried hours to the weekly or hourly hours and that is the number that goes

in the denominator.

So those are the only two pieces of information you need to do this calculation.

So now, we're going to do, let's just kind of do a sample calculation.

Let's say we have a company that makes widgets and this widget manufacturing company last

year sustained three recordable injuries.

Three people got stitches, okay, cut themselves, got stitches.

Those are called recordable injuries.

That is the number that goes right here.

Now this hypothetical widget manufacturing company we have, let's say that widget manufacturing

company has 75 employees, each of whom worked 2,000 hours during the previous year.

So that is 150,000 total hours.

And that is the number that goes in the denominator.

Those are the only two numbers you need.

This number and this number.

Those are the only two numbers you need to do the calculation.

So let's finish this calculation for our hypothetical widget manufacturing company.

So we take 3 x 200,000.

That's the numerator.

And divide that by 150,000 total hours worked.

That, then, is equal to 600,000 divided by 150,000.

Or is equal to 4, if you do that.

So, in this case, our TRIR, total recordable injury rate is equal to 4.

OK, that's all there is to this calculation.

It is not a difficult calculation.

Now, having done this calculation, you may be wondering what does this number mean?

Is that good?

Or is it bad?

Is OSHA going to come after me if they see my number and it's 4?

What does that mean?

Well, this is a standard number or an index.

For example, if you're a roofing contractor, every roofing contractor can do the calculation

and they'll come up with their number and your roofing contractor business can be compared

to all the other roofing contractor businesses.

I will tell you that for a roofing contractor, the average total recordable injury rate is

probably in the range of 6 to 7.

So if you're a roofing contractor and your total recordable injury rate for the previous

year was 4, you're doing good.

Most likely, it's going to be 4 if you're in the roofing business.

If you're a widget manufacturer and you have a manufacturing plant and you make widgets,

4 is going to be pretty close to the average for manufacturing industries.

So it depends on what kind of business you have.

Healthcare has a TRIR average, construction, manufacturing, every kind of business has

their own number.

So, the way you figure out where you are in here is that every year, the Department of

Labor, the Bureau of Labor Statistics part of that publishes a list North American Industrial

Classification System Codes.

For every one of those codes, they publish the average TRIR.

So the average injury rate, you can look up.

If you're below the average industry injury rate, you're doing great.

If your business is above average, then you have room for improvement on your safety program.

And so that's what OSHA does with this number.

Also, another thing this number is good for is that if you're a small construction company,

you're probably wanting to get contracts with large multi-hundreds of millions of dollars

companies, and if you want to get contracts with those companies, they're going to want

to know what your safety record is.

They're going to want to know who they're doing business with.

They're going to want to know if you come on their site are they going to have a problem.

And they figure that out partially based on your OSHA injury rate, so there's a lot of

good reasons to keep your score as low as possible.

So, if you want a copy of the script and the hard copy of the calculations that I've done

for this and some other ways that you can calculate for your total days away from work

calculation, how to modify this to do some other things, just go to the bottom of the

page.

There should be a link down there.

Click on that link and we'll send you a copy of my script for this presentation and a copy

of our link to all the NAICS codes and the average injury rate for those codes.

And also if you would, if you would do us a big favor and click subscribe and like.

Thank you very much and you have a great day.