Do you know the leading cause of non-fatal workplace injuries?
Dramatic accidents involving long falls or amputations in machines are often what makes headlines when it comes to non-fatal safety issues. But the costliest disabling injuries for industry, at least when it comes to Workers Compensation, involve something much more routine – overexertion.
That’s the conclusion of the2011 Liberty Mutual Safety Index, which found that about 25 percent of total direct workers compensation costs from injuries that kept workers off the job for six days or more stemmed from overexertion, which includes lifting, pushing, pulling, holding, carrying or throwing. That amounted to $12.75 billion in costs of an estimated $50.1 billion total in 2009, the most recent year for which data is available.
Others in the top 10, and their estimated cost:
• Fall on the same level — $7.9 billion
• Fall to lower level — $5.4 billion
• Bodily reaction — $5.3 billion
• Struck by object — $4.6 billion
• Highway incident — $2.2 billion
• Caught in/compressed by — $2 billion
• Struck against object — $2 billion
• Repetitive motion — $2 billion
• Assault violent act — $0.6 billion
The path to reducing these injuries? Skills training of course is helpful. But the truth is that for overexertion and many of the other items on the list, most workers know perfectly well how to act more safely – they just have to want to do it. Safety awareness training can help workers realize just what is at stake when they venture into behavior they know is unsafe.
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