Checkout our new video explaining everything you need to know about OSHA’s TRIR & DART
In this blog post, we’ll define and discuss two critical safety performance metrics that you need to understand in order to maintain OSHA compliance, reduce workplace injuries, and reduce the risk for OSHA fines and penalties and enforcement inspections:
– TRIR: Total Recordable Incident Rate
– DART: Days Away from work, days of Restricted work activity, and/or days of jobs Transfer
Why is it important to understand these key safety metrics?
The primarily value of TRIR and DART is to evaluate and quantify a company’s safety performance.
Companies that meet OSHA’s record keeping requirements must calculate, report and post these values on an annual basis via OSHA 300 & 300A Logs.
High (ie: poor) TRIR and DART scores can trigger targeted OSHA inspections, which are typically “comprehensive” in nature meaning that they’ll scrutinize virtually all components of companies health and safety programs. This includes written programs, employee training, record keeping requirements, and documentation of routine inspections to identify and correct health and safety hazards. For companies that aren’t prepared, this can lead to significant fines and penalties that can add up to $tens or even $hundreds of thousands of dollars. It happens every single day to US companies.
Company customers and clients often scrutinize the safety performance of vendors to help determine who they want to do business with. High scores can often result in lost business, while low scores can result in gained and/or increased business.
These metrics can sometimes impact the cost of insurance premiums.
Fair or not, a quick glance at a company’s TRIR and DART scores tell much, either good or bad, about a company and it’s culture.
Obviously, these two key safety performance metrics are vital and must be managed, tracked and reported in order to ensure a safe & healthy work place, reduce regulatory risk, meet customer scrutiny, and control the cost of insurance premiums.
Want to learn more? Read on….
THE DETAILS
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Definition of Recordable Cases
Before getting into the details surrounding TRIR and DART, it’s important to understand what a Recordable Case or Incident is:
Definition of “Recordable Cases”: All work related deaths and illnesses, and those work-related injuries which result in: death, loss of consciousness, restriction of work or motion, transfer to another job, or require medical treatment beyond first aid.
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How are TRIR and DART Calculated and what is their additional relevance?
TRIR: Formula: Total Number of Recordable Cases x 200,000/divided by total hours worked by all employees during the year covered.
Relevance:
Allows you (as well as your customers and OSHA) to compare your injury rates to other company’s injury rates that are in businesses similar to yours.
Companies and Customers often request and scrutinize this vital Safety Performance Indicator during the evaluation process in order to determine which contractors they want to work with!
IMPORTANT NOTE: OSHA’s 200,000 standard annual hours benchmark unfairly penalizes smaller companies with few employees and much smaller total annual work hours. In other words, even 1 or 2 recordable injuries incurred by a smaller contractor will greatly inflate the TRIR score. Unfortunately OSHA and customers don’t normally take this into account when scrutinizing your scores, which is another reason why it is vital that companies work hard to reduce injuries and illness in the workplace.
* DART: Cases which involve Days Away from work, days of Restricted work activity, and/or days of job Transfer.
* Calculation: Number of CASES with days away from work or job transfer or restrictions (cases on 300 log with either column H or I checked) multiplied by 200,000/divided by total hours worked by all employees during the year covered.
(**How did OSHA come up with 200,000 as the benchmark standard for these formulas? It’s the equivalent of 100 employees working 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year and provides the standard base for incident rates**)
WANT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THESE KEY SAFETY METRICS, & HOW TO MANAGE AND REDUCE THEM?
CALL 512-457-0374 OR CLICK BELOW
