Tom Barnes
Compliance Specialists, Inc.
The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) recently issued new accident reporting rules that go into effect on January 1, 2015. These rules cover what type of incidents must be reported to OSHA and in what timeframe. First, here are a few items to keep in mind:
- Employers with 10 or fewer employees are partially exempt from some OSHA recordkeeping requirements such as OSHA 300 recordkeeping. These facilities are, however, required to report fatalities and injuries.
- This is a federal mandate and, at this time, only affects the 28 states under federal OSHA jurisdiction. If you are in a state with a state OSHA enforcement agency, you will need to check with them to see if they are adopting the new regulations. OSHA is strongly encouraging all state plans to adopt the new rules.
Now let’s discuss the new rules. In the past, OSHA required all employers to notify them within 8 hours of any workplace fatality or in-hospitalization of three or more employees from a work-related event. Keep in mind that the 8 hours is from the time your facility first became aware of a fatality or in-patient hospitalization of three or more employees. Nights, weekends or holidays were never considered an excuse for the delay of notification. This requirement holds true with the new regulations as well.
The new regulations taking effect at the beginning of the year maintain the same requirement for fatalities. Any fatality must be reported to OSHA within 8 hours of the fatality occurring. The major change involves in-patient hospitalization of employees due to a work-related injury. The new regulations now provide 24 hours for the facility to report. However, it now must be reported even if just one employee is placed into the in-patient hospitalization system. Additionally, OSHA now requires reporting of any amputation or loss of an eye to any single employee regardless whether the individual is hospitalized. The required timeframe for reporting these types of workplace injuries is 24 hours.
The definition of a loss of an eye is self-explanatory, but OSHA’s definition of amputation requires some discussion. While the loss of any limb or appendage is quite obvious, OSHA also includes the loss of any fingertip, whether or not it included bone loss. Additionally, OSHA requires notification of the amputation within 24 hours even if the loss was successfully reattached. Finally, OSHA considers it an amputation if it is completely or partially amputated. A complete definition of amputation can be found on OSHA’s website.
The reporting requirements do not apply if a fatality occurs 30 or more days after a work-related injury or in-patient hospitalization, or if an amputation or loss of an eye occur more than 24 hours after the time of the work-related accident. Therefore, someone being hospitalized for a surgery resulting from a work-related accident more than 24 hours after the injury would not be required to report this to OSHA. Other exemptions from these reporting requirements include motor vehicle accidents (as long as it did not occur in a construction zone), accidents occurring while taking public transportation (plane, rail), or in-patient hospitalization for observation purposes only. Please note that while the facility is exempt from reporting these directly to OSHA, they still must be recorded on your OSHA 300 logs.
In summary, the major changes to these requirements now require reporting to OSHA within 24 hours: any employee being in-patient hospitalized; any amputation described above; or an incident involving a loss of an eye. The notification can be made to your local area office or to the OHSA 24-hour number at 1-800-321-OSHA (6742).
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