Liberty Mutual has released its annual workplace safety index for 2014.  The annual report ranks the top 10 causes of serious yet nonfatal workplace injuries based on information collected by Liberty Mutual – who is one of the largest workers comp insurance carriers, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), and the National Academy of Social Insurance.  All the data is collected and analyzed by the Liberty Mutual Research Institute for Safety to determine what injuries caused employees to miss six or more days of work and rank that  to the total amount spent on workers compensation costs.

The data provided is for injuries and events that occurred in 2012 which is the most recent year that this data is available for.  the index shows that that most debilitating 10 injuries caused the workers comp industry to spend $59.58 billion dollars.

The number one cause of injury which lead to the most workers comp dollars spent was Overexertion involving outside sources – this is categorized by lifting, pushing, pulling, holding, carrying, or throwing.  These events accounted for a cost of $15.1 billion dollars of workers comp costs.  Falls on the same level came in second accounting for $9.19 billion dollars in costs, followed by being Struck by object or equipment at $5.3 billion in costs.  In total the top fives causes of injury accounted for 65.4 percent of the total 2012 workers comp spend.

The remaining five injuries accounted for 18.4 percent of costs from a debilitating injury.  83.8 percent of the total costs of workers comp in 2012 can be found in  this index.  What does this data show us?  To me it shows that if we have very strict safety initiatives and safety programs that many of these injuries can be prevented and we can possibly see a drop in the total amount of costs associated with workers compensation injuries.

Read the full Liberty Mutual Index Report here.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics report can be found here.