Fatality Reporting

“OSHA’s Fatality & Injury Reporting Rule: What We Know After One Year” [Webinar Recording]

Eric J. Conn Leave a comment

On February 11th, Eric J. Conn and Lindsay A. Smith of Conn Maciel Carey’s national OSHA Practice Group delivered a complimentary webinar regarding “OSHA’s New Fatality and Injury Reporting Rule – What We Know Now” as part of the Firm’s 2016 OSHA Webinar Series.

To kick off 2015, OSHA rolled-out a major change to its Fatality & Injury Reporting Rule to require employers to contact OSHA thousands of times more often to report incidents, which means many more inspections.  A year into the new reporting regime now, it seemed like the perfect time to take a look at what is being reported to OSHA and what OSHA is doing with all the new reports.

Participants learned about: Continue reading →

OSHA’s Web Portal for Fatality and Injury Reporting Goes Live – But Use It with Caution

Eric J. Conn Leave a comment

By Eric J. Conn, Chair of Conn Maciel Carey’s OSHA Practice

In addition to employers’ longstanding obligation to report to OSHA all work-related fatalities within 8 hours, as of January 1, 2015, all employers were required to also begin reporting to OSHA within 24 hours, all work-related in-patient hospitalizations (of just a single employee), amputations and losses of an eye . OSHA is publishing the details about these reported injuries online.

Reporting 1

We have written extensively about OSHA’s new reporting rule, including articles that:

  1. Explain the requirements of the new rule;
  2. Describe what happens after injuries are reported to OSHA; and
  3. Dissect the nuances of the amputation component of the rule.

Under the new reporting rule, employers have three ways to perfect the notification to OSHA. As has been compliant for year, employers may call the nearest OSHA Area Office or call OSHA’s toll-free reporting hotline – 800-321-OSHA.

The new rule also introduced a new reporting methodology – a web portal for online fatality and injury reporting. The web portal, however, was under development until just a couple of weeks ago.

OSHA was very excited to Reporting Web Portalintroduce the new web portal because of the “success” of OSHA’s other recent experiment with web portal reporting – whistleblower retaliation complaints. A couple of years ago, OSHA introduced a convenient web portal for employees to report retaliation complaints, and the number of complaints filed by employees surged.

OSHA believes injuries and fatalities are being under-reported by employers, so OSHA supposed that could be addressed by this more convenient technology.

While the online reporting portal is an easy method for reporting, and it is available 24/7, it does have major drawbacks. Employers should Continue reading →

OSHA’s New Hospitalization, Amputation, and Fatality Reporting Rule: Time to Add OSHA to Your Speed Dial

Amanda Strainis-Walker Leave a comment

By Eric J. Conn and Amanda R. Strainis-Walker

On New Year’s Day 2015, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) new serious injury and fatality reporting rule became effective, significantly revising the triggering events for reporting workplace accidents to OSHA under the Agency’s Injury and Illness Recordkeeping regulations at 29 C.F.R. 1910.104, et seq.

New Injury and Illness Reporting Rule

The new regulations differ from the long-standing incident reporting rule in four ways:

  1. Lower the threshold for proactively reporting a catastrophic incident from the hospitalization of three or more employees to the hospitalization of a single employee;Reporting 3.JPG
  1. Add amputations (including partial amputations) and loss of an eye to the types of injuries that employers must proactively report;
  1. Introduce an internet portal for employers to submit reportable events; and
  1. Require publication of the reporting events on OSHA’s public website.

Requirements of the New Reporting Rule. The reporting rule has been long-referred to informally as the “Fat-Cat” rule because it requires employers to report to OSHA all incidents that result in an employee fatality (Fat) or a catastrophe (Cat). The new regulation redefines catastrophe. Historically, a catastrophe had been defined as an incident that resulted in the overnight hospitalization for treatment of three or more employees.  The Agency views the new report triggering events as indicative of serious hazards at a workplace. Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA David Michaels explained that:

“hospitalizations and amputations [are] sentinel events, indicating that serious hazards are likely to be present at a workplace and that an intervention is warranted to protect the other workers at the establishment.”

In addition to lowering the threshold from three to one employee hospitalizations, OSHA also changed the definition of “hospitalization.” Historically, an employee’s overnight hospital stay triggered the reporting requirement. Under the new rule, whether the hospitalization is a reportable event turns not on whether the employee stays overnight, but rather, whether the employee is formally admitted to the “in-patient” service of the hospital or clinic. The visit, however, must involve medical care after the in-patient admission. A hospital visit only for observation or diagnostic testing, even if it involves in-patient admission, does not constitute a reportable event.

The concepts of “formal admission” and “in-patient service” seem to be causing significant confusion in the new rule’s early stages. While OSHA continues to Continue reading →