Washington’s Safety & Health Assessment & Research for Prevention (SHARP) Program released a report that shows workplace safety inspections and consultations continue to do their part to reduce workers’ comp claims in the state.

Since 2002 the SHARP program has done an annual analysis on the association between enforcement and consultations by the Washington State Division of Occupational Safety & Health and compensable claims rates. The program compared data from 2016 and 2017, which included 18,618 accounts based on five different criteria. The criteria included organizations with at least five-time employees between fiscal year 2014 and 2017, and those with a single location. It also tracked results from fixed-site and non-fixed-site industries, along with smaller organizations with five to 24 full-time employees. The report also tracked data for industries or companies that underwent an inspection or consultation from the state’s L&I Division of Occupational Safety & Health as well as those that had no contact with the agency.

Among fixed-site industries, inspections led to a claims rate reduction of 36.7 percent. For fixed-site industries, consultations were linked to a 30 percent decrease. For workplaces that had no contact with the agency, non-fixed-site industries saw a decrease of 5.8 percent while fixed-site industries saw an average decrease of 3.1 percent in their claims rate.

Consultations had a particularly big impact on small establishments with fixed sites, they had a 58.2 percent decline in claims rates. Small establishments with non-fixed sites that had inspections saw a 44.1 percent reduction.

These results are comparable to long-term data that has been collected since 1999. Since then enforcement activity has had the biggest impact on fixed-site industries with a 12.6 average decline in claims rate, and for non-fixed-site industries the claims rate decreased an average of 8.8 percent.

Read the report here and read more here.