In this installment of EHSDA Shorts, Mike Pelz, Vice President of Health and Safety Solutions, Examinetics, explains what you need to understand about workplace injuries.
This clip is taken from a webinar titled Designing an Effective Injury Management Program, which is available for free on-demand here. The webinar is sponsored by Examinetics.
Transcript (edited for clarity):
Pelz: One of the biggest things that I think is always an important aspect is from a research standpoint, understanding your business, understanding the who, when, where, and why injuries are occurring so that you can start looking at how you implement this. One of the key resources that I think is so critical is the proper evaluation of your last three years’ loss run data.
This is something that you will work with your insurance carrier on to get critical information that you should really be reviewing on a quarterly basis so that you are understanding the trends and tendencies that go into what is creating these opportunities for a work-related injury.
One of the things that I think is very important as you work with your insurance provider for your last three years’ loss run data is to really try to get them to provide you critical information so you can look at trends and tendencies. Making sure that you will not only have the employees, the date of the incident, the type of injury that was sustained, what were the outcomes? Did it result in time loss versus restricted duty or full duty?
But also try to get them to incorporate things like their start dates. And this is really important because you also want to start identifying where in the employee life cycle injuries are happening. Do you have a high volume of injuries that are happening in the first 90 to 120 days or do you find that most of your injuries are happening towards the longer duration that employees have been with you? Those things combined with your incident reports are very important.
Your incident reporting you should be something that is a very standardized process because it gathers quick key information. I know companies have two basic rules of thumb on incident reporting. I see a lot of clients out there that will just do a narrative via email, which I’m not a big proponent of because it doesn’t always capture the same data the same way each and every time.
If you don’t have a standardized incident report, it’s something I would feel that you will get a lot of value because it’s ensuring you’re gathering all the same information for every single incident. You are able to track that information.
You will also be able to see what are some of the contributing factors that may have led to a negative outcome on an injury. Some of the most common areas of contributing factors that will negatively impact how an injury is managed is timely reporting. We see that quite frequently.
You know, you have an employee that might come in on a Monday and say, “Oh by the way, I tweaked my back two weeks ago, now I need medical attention.” Timing, timeliness of reporting, timeliness of getting the medical attention has a significant impact on the plan of care that is prescribed.
So through your incident reports, if you are able to basically identify and document not only when the incidents are occurring, but when they’re being reported and when medical treatment is being provided, it may provide you some real critical information on how we want to structure the program moving forward.
The other part of it is compliance to your current program and what your current program entails, which is what we’re going to start getting into because really how your program is structured must be taken into account whenever you are looking at how you want to basically advance your injury management program.