Occupational Health and Safety Statistics Report - Frequency Rate

[samvara]

Things wot I learned today: you can get a report that measures the frequency of (reportable) injuries per year per total person hours worked.

• Frequency = (reportable injuries /people hours) * 1,000,000

The 1,000,000 is to get the numbers to look like integers rather than things like 0.000006 which is hard to relate to.

I ran it for Industry versus Gender because I love me a good chart. I'm unsurprised to see Transport, Manufacturing, Construction and Ag. as the main offenders and want to know what "Personal and Other Services" are.



I tried to find comparable US data and the closest I can find is a PDF of what appears to be similar type calcs except it turns out you have to multiply the US frequency by 5.

• Frequency (US) = (reportable injuries / people hours) * 200,000

Huh, no two systems ever use the same baseline :(

Comments

[sara]

I would not be surprised to learn that "Personal and Other Services" includes home health aides, who have a fairly high injury rate because they pick people up a lot and people are heavy. But they might be under "Health and Community Services."

[samvara]

Ah, lifting and handling would explain a lot...

[zing_och]

Today at work I read the injury report for my workplace - mostly garbage disposal and street cleaning, with garbage disposal having the highest injury rate. The baseline they used is yet another one - (number of injuries x 1000) / number of fulltime employees; apparently this "1000-Mann-Formel" ist the standard system in Germany. (Though Wikipedia tells me the US OSHA system becomes more common around here, too.)

[samvara]

That's interesting! I figure they all say the same thing, so long as you compensate for fulltimme / parttime, it just makes it hard to compare between countries :(