The National Safety Council has launched a Workplace section of its Injury Facts database to provide employers with trends and information on injuries.
The organization revealed the new section at the National Safety Congress & Expo in Houston. On-the-job fatalities rose 7.3% in 2016, driven by issues such as transportation, falls, and violence.
“We are eight times safer at work than we are at home, but the data remind us that our workplaces could still be much safer,” said Ken Kolosh, NSC manager of statistics. “The numbers underscore the need for public awareness. We hope Injury Facts can help people understand the biggest risks to their safety and help employers understand where to focus their risk management efforts.”
Noteworthy workplace safety trends and offerings highlighted in the new section of Injury Facts include:
Women are disproportionately impacted by nonfatal workplace violence, with 70% of all assault-related injuries in the workplace occurring to females.
The construction industry continues to experience the most worker deaths, leading all industries with 959 fatalities in 2016.
Workplace injuries cost society $151 billion annually between lost productivity and wages, medical expenses and administrative expenses. The cost of a single workplace death is $1.12 million.
Encouragingly, injuries from falls to a lower level (48,060) and falls to the same level (141,600) are both trending down.
Overdoses from the non-medical use of drugs or alcohol while on the job increased from 165 in 2015 to 217 in 2016, a 32% increase.
Safety professionals often want to compare, or benchmark, the workplace injury and illness incidence rates of their organizations with national average rates. To make this easy, Injury Facts now includes a tool that does not require employers to know their North American Industry Calculator System number (NAICS) to perform a search. Once employers have calculated their incident rate, they can input their results and compare to others in their industry.
Injury Facts is the Council’s 98-year-old compilation of preventable death and injury that has transitioned to an online, interactive portal in order to expedite the flow of critical safety information to the general public. Injury Facts is available at injuryfacts.nsc.org.