2002 AJN Table of Contents
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Health & Safety
American Journal of Nursing -
February, 2002 - Volume 102, Issue 2
Make Sure You're an OSHA Statistic
By Karen Worthington, MS, RN, COHN-S
How can I be sure that any work-related injuries and illnesses nurses sustain at my hospital are being reported accurately to OSHA?
Your employer is required to keep records of all job-related injuries, illnesses, and deaths if your workplace is covered by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act and employs 11 or more workers. (The act applies to most private employers as well as public sector workplaces in 25 states.) On January 1, 2002, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) issued a revised rule to improve the system that employers use to track and record workplace injuries and illnesses. OSHA Form 300, the Log of Work-Related Injuries and Illnesses, commonly called the OSHA log, is the yearly summary of these required records and reflects the recent record-keeping changes.
Your employer must post the OSHA log every February in a visible place and must make the previous five years' logs readily available to employees. In addition, the Occupational Safety and Health Act mandates that the logs' information must be made available if requested by any former or current employee or a representative selected by an employee.
Injuries and illnesses that must be recorded on the OSHA log include those that result in
- medical treatment other than first aid.
- transfer to another job or light duty.
- restricted work (including lost work days) or motion.
- loss of consciousness.
- death.
Requesting the OSHA log can be the first step toward ensuring that your employer is not only reporting injuries accurately but also addressing the hazards that cause them. By reviewing these logs, you can find out
- the most frequent types of injuries and illnesses.
- the units or departments in which injuries and illnesses occur.
- the jobs of the injured workers.
- the severity of injuries and illnesses (including how much work time has been lost).
The OSHA log will enable you to determine if the most serious hazards affecting the nursing workforce are being addressed by your employer. For example, your hospital may be focusing most of its safety training efforts on fire security and chemical spill responses when the OSHA log clearly shows that back injury is the most frequent health and safety concern affecting nurses. Information in the OSHA log can support your case for stepped-up prevention efforts for specific health and safety hazards. Next year, you can see if those prevention efforts worked by comparing the new OSHA log with this year's.
Other valuable information can be obtained from the logs. For example, as reported in Issues Update, November 1996, the Minnesota Nurses Association (MNA) suspected that increasing injuries and illnesses among its members at 12 facilities were the result of a 9% downsizing of the RN workforce from 1990 to 1994. The MNA gathered the OSHA logs from this period, tabulated the numbers, and, as suspected, found a 65% increase in injuries and illnesses among nurses. Using this information, the MNA bargained for improved staffing levels at these facilities.
Submit your request for the OSHA log to your facility's safety director. If challenged, make it clear that OSHA grants you the right to this information; OSHA details these rights at its Web site, entitled Worker Rights Under the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, at www.osha.gov/as/opa/worker/rights.html. If your employer denies you copies of the OSHA log for the current or previous five years, or if you suspect that your employer is falsifying
or failing to maintain these records, contact your state nurses association and work with it to file a complaint to OSHA.
The ANA's Workplace Health and Safety Guide for Nurses contains a full chapter on
analyzing and tabulating OSHA logs. To order, go to www.nursesbooks.org, or call (800) 637-0323. To learn what is required under OSHA's revised rule for record keeping, go to www.osha-slc.gov/recordkeeping/index.html.
Karen Worthington is a senior occupational health and safety specialist at the ANA.
Use the OSHA log to support your case for prevention efforts.
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