How expensive can a process recordable injury be to a facility?
The staggering costs…Improving safety processes in your company can dramatically reduce the number of lost time and minor injuries and their direct and indirect costs, which can destroy projected earnings.
The costs of worker injuries are huge. For example, in 2004, OSHA estimated the direct costs of a lost-time injury to be more than $25,000. The typical indirect costs are often 10 times the direct costs. Obviously, this means a single lost-time injury will flog more than $250,000 in profits from your company bank deposits. Yikes! If your company’s profits are derived from a margin of 10%, you will need to earn at least $2.5 million to pay the cost of that single lost-time injury. Doing nothing to control lost-time injuries is utterly nuts.
The costs of all the recordable injuries can also be big, certainly when considering approximately 30 minor injuries occur for every lost-time injury. The direct cost for each recordable injury is more than $8,000, multiplied by 10 times for indirect costs. That means by the time you’ve accumulated all those, one recordable injury costs around $80,000.
The ratio of 1 lost-time injury to 30 recordable injuries, then the total direct/indirect costs for just one lost-time injury and 30 recordable injuries[$250,000 (LTI) + $2,500,000 (30 recordable injuries)] are nearly $2,75 million. Worse yet, merely giving lip service to safety is absolute madness.
