How Much Are Accidents Really Costing You? Find Out

In addition to the costs in pain and suffering to workers and their families, workplace accidents have a major impact on your bottom line. The Liberty Mutual  Workplace Safety Index for 2010 estimates that employers nationwide pay over $1 billion per week for direct workers’ compensation costs alone.

But that’s only half the story, since costs of workplace injuries and illnesses include both direct and indirect costs.

• Direct costs include workers’ compensation payments, medical expenses, and costs for legal services.
• Indirect costs include training replacement employees, accident investigation and implementation of corrective measures, lost productivity, repairs of damaged equipment and property, and costs associated with lower employee morale and absenteeism.

To estimate how much accidents in your workplace are really costing your organization, you can consult OSHA’s “$afety Pays” program.

“$afety Pays is an interactive expert system to assist you in estimating the costs of occupational injuries and illnesses and the impact on your company’s profitability.

This system uses a company’s profit margin, the average costs of an injury or illness, and an indirect cost multiplier to project the amount of sales a company would need to generate in order to cover those costs.

---

Great news! BLR’s renowned Safety.BLR.com^® website now has even more timesaving features. Take our no-cost site tour! Or better yet, try it at no cost or obligation for a full 2 weeks.

---

Predict Costs

OSHA says you can use this information to predict the direct and indirect impact of injuries and illnesses on your workplace. This will give you yet another piece of ammunition to use to support your argument for investing in safety and health programs.

$afety Pays is easy to use and:

• Offers choices from a set of lost workday injuries and illnesses
• Prompts you for information to do the analysis
• Allows you to input the actual loss figures or workers’ compensation costs
• Generates a report of the costs and the sales needed to cover those costs

To find out more about the $afety Pays program and to access the interactive system go to the $afety Pays page on OSHA’s website.

---

Your one-stop safety management resource, available 24/7. Go here to take a no-cost site tour or here to try it in your own office!

---

Get the Information You Need

When assessing risks, counting costs, or performing any of your other duties, you need good, reliable information. What better place to turn than Safety.BLR.com? You’ll find the information you need, 24/7.

This unique website provides you with regulatory analysis, safety and health news, all the latest from OSHA, information about state safety and health regulations, and much more. It’s all a few keystrokes away, reported and interpreted for you by our safety experts.

What’s more, this one-stop safety website is a fantastic resource for safety training materials on just about any topic you can imagine.

Training responsibilities become a snap with Safety.BLR.com’s thousands of audio presentations, PowerPoints, prewritten safety meetings, toolbox talks, trainer’s guides, and much, much more. You’ll find training tools on more than 120 safety topics along with plain-English compliance analysis and other resources.

At a time when budget considerations are paramount, what makes more sense than an all-in-one safety training and compliance solution?

And BLR has revamped Safety.BLR.com to meet your needs even better. You’ll be amazed by all the features and functionality of the site. Highlights include:

• Side-by-Side State/Federal Compliance. By placing our state and federal regulatory analysis side by side, you easily see how to fully comply with both governmental entities.
• MSDS Library Expansion. The site now provides an immense library of 3.5 million MSDS forms, with about 10,000 more added or changed every week. Need one? Just call up the chemical by name, manufacturer, product group, or CAS number, then print it out.
• Newsletter Wizard. If you’ve ever wanted to publish a safety newsletter but felt lacking in editorial skills, this new addition is for you.
• Plan Builder. Select from our library of safety plans, customize them to suit your company’s needs, and assemble them into collections you can save in our personal library.

We’re pretty excited about Safety.BLR.com and all of its enhancements, and we’re eager for you to experience it, too. That’s why we’ve created a complimentary site tour, available here. It takes just 5 minutes.

If you like what you see, you’re invited to try the site at no cost and with no obligation. We’ll even give you a complimentary special report for doing so. Go here to take a 5-minute tour of Safety.BLR.com. It may be just what you’re looking for.

More Articles on Safety Management