Record keeping revisited

As most roofing professionals know, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's (OSHA's) requirements for record keeping involve more than simply tracking employee injuries and illnesses. OSHA also requires employers to accurately log lost workdays, understand different categories of injuries and steer through paperwork piles to comply with its record-keeping standard.

Since OSHA was established in 1971, the agency has gathered information about workers' injuries and illnesses using Occupational Injury and Illness Recording and Reporting Requirements (the record-keeping standard) and OSHA Forms 200 and 101. Unfortunately, many employers found the forms and original standard complicated and confusing.

Currently, there are 1.4 million U.S. employers whose businesses must comply with the agency's original record-keeping standard. With the Jan. 1 release of OSHA's revised standard, many hope the regulations will be easier to follow and make compliance a little less troublesome. According to OSHA, the revised standard yields more accurate injury and illness data and better protects employee privacy.

Changes

If you employ 10 or fewer employees, you are not required to maintain records of employees' injuries and illnesses. But if you hire enough employees at any time during one year to exceed 10, you are required to follow OSHA's record-keeping requirements the following year no matter how many people you actually employ during that year.

The original standard required employers to record all illnesses no matter how minor the ailment. Now, illnesses or injuries caused by eating and drinking, blood donations and exercise programs no longer need to be recorded. Neither do cases of common colds or flu.

The original standard also required employers to record whether employees suffered from work-related injuries or work-related illnesses. The revised standard, however, uses just one set of criteria for recording injuries and illnesses. Also, criteria for determining whether mental illnesses are considered work-related have been added to the revised standard.

According to the new standard, you are required to record work-related injuries or illnesses if they result in death, days away from work, restricted work or transfer to another job, medical treatment beyond first aid, loss of consciousness, or diagnosis of a significant injury or illness by a physician or other licensed health-care professional.

In addition, medical treatment and first aid have been redefined. Observation and diagnostic tests are not considered medical treatment for the purposes of recording a case. To help you determine whether to record a case in which a worker has sought first aid, OSHA provides a list of activities it defines as first aid. For example, first aid includes the use of nonprescription medication at nonprescription strength; cleaning, flushing or soaking wounds on the skin's surface; and the use of bandages, gauze pads or butterfly bandages.

For injuries that occur outside the workplace, the revised standard simplifies the criteria for determining whether an injury still is work-related. For example, an injury or illness that results from an employee performing personal tasks (unrelated to his job) outside his assigned working hours is not recordable. However, if a worker is injured from falling on ice while coming to work, for example, the accident would be recorded in the log.

If you decide an injury or illness is not work-related and OSHA issues a citation for failure to record the injury or illness, the burden of proof would be on OSHA to show the incident is work-related.

Hearing and MSDs

The new OSHA regulations also include criteria for recording work-related hearing loss. To help determine hearing loss, an employer must implement a hearing conservation program when employees are exposed to more than 85 decibels over eight hours. As part of the program, licensed health-care professionals must conduct annual audiometric testing.

Recording work-related hearing loss will not be implemented until Jan. 1, 2003, pending further comment about the level of hearing loss that should be recorded as a "significant" health condition.

According to the revised standard, musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs), which OSHA defines as disorders of muscles, nerves, tendons, ligaments, joints, cartilage and spinal discs, also must be recorded as of Jan. 1, 2003. If a disorder arises from a slip, trip, fall, motor-vehicle accident or other similar accident, it should not be recorded as an MSD incident. This section of the rule is delayed so OSHA can obtain more information from the public about appropriate definitions of the terms "ergonomics injury" and "MSD."

Lost days

Under the revised standard, the term "lost workdays" is eliminated. Days away from work now will be recorded based on the number of lost calendar days rather than lost scheduled workdays. You now must record employees' days away from work, days of restricted work or transfers to other jobs.

The number of days away from work is limited to a maximum of 180. You also must record all holidays, vacations, layoffs and weekends during an employee's illness or injury period when using the OSHA 300 form. (OSHA 300 and 301 record-keeping forms replaced OSHA 200 and other forms as a result of the revised standard.)

Being prepared

As employers switch from the original record-keeping system to the new one, beginning in 2003, annual summaries, certified by company executives, are to be posted for three months—February, March and April. The previous standard required annual summaries to be posted in February.

To help share information about the revised standard, OSHA held training sessions for its trainers in October 2001. The agency also conducted satellite training for 1,300 OSHA employees and the public in December 2001.

New record-keeping forms, training materials, fact sheets and other assistance are available on OSHA's Web site, www.osha.gov. For businesses without Web access, OSHA prepared printed materials. For more information, call OSHA at (800) 321-OSHA (6742).

In addition, NRCA issued a Special Report about the rule. It is available to NRCA members on NRCA's Web site, www.nrca.net. For more information, contact NRCA's Risk Management Section at (800) 323-9545.

Although record-keeping still may be viewed as inconvenient by some, it is a necessary part of running a successful business. Now, new OSHA regulations with clearer instructions make compliance a little easier.

Peter Greenbaum is NRCA's manager of education programs.