OSHA Just Made Injury Reporting Much Easier

Regardless of how unfortunate they are, injuries are part of the workplace, especially when you’re dealing in a more traditional, industrial setting. And while filing injury reports has been a pain in the past, OSHA recently made the process of injury reporting much simpler.

How Online Injury Reporting Works

Employers are required to notify OSHA if an employee suffers a fatality on the job or when an employee suffers work-related amputations, hospitalizations, or loss of an eye. Any fatality that occurs on-site must be reported within eight hours of the incident and any amputation, hospitalization or loss of an eye must be reported within the 24-hour period of time following such occurrence.

The online injury reporting form, which can be found here, is very simple to utilize.

You must first select which state the injury occurred in via the dropdown box. Not all states (e.g. Alaska) can use the online form to submit a report, so whether or not you’ll be able to take advantage of this new tool will vary. If you’re unable to use the online form, you’ll receive a “State Exemption Message” which will provide you phone numbers to call should an accident occur.

If you live in a state that allows you to submit reports online, you will be taken to a screen that houses the form. The form itself requires a good bit of information, so make sure you have everything you need ready to go prior to filling it out.

Let’s look at the kind of information you’ll want to have handy.

Info You’ll Need to Have Handy

As previously stated, the form requires a good bit of information about your company, the victim, and details about when and where the incident happened. Here are some specifics that are required:

• Incident location information (name of location, city, state, county, zip code)
• Incident information (date and time the incident occurred, what happened)
• Employer information (legal business name, street address, city, state)
• One or two individuals OSHA can contact (first name, last name, title, work phone, email address)
• Victim(s) information (first name, last name, what the injury/illness was)

The form allows the user to input information in other, optional, fields as well if he or she feels giving more granular detail is necessary. Questions about whether or not there was a fatality, loss of limb, loss of an eye, or whether or not the victim was hospitalized are also asked.

Injuries aren’t fun to deal with and injury reporting can be difficult and tedious. However, OSHA’s new online reporting platform should help ease the burden and shows the organization is willing to follow technological trends.