Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Calculation of Incident Rate, Injury Severity Rate & Injury Frequency Rate

Hi all,


I guess it's inevitable that one day, accident might happen in your workplace. May it be minor to major, as long as the incident is recordable (more than 3 days Medical Leave), your safety statistic will be affected. Your boss will be asking from you shortly, what is the updated Incident Rate, Injury Severity Rate or Injury Frequency Rate. Not very familiar to you? Well, here is how we calculate these 3 items.


1) Incident Rate = (No. of recordable injuries X 200,000) / No. of hours worked (since the last recordable injury)

*Recordable Injuries = Any work related injury or illness that requires more than first aid
treatment and/or results in loss of consciousness, restriction of work motion or transfer to another job.



2) Injury Severity Rate = (No. of loss time injuries X 1,000,000) / No. of hours worked (since the last injury)


*Loss time injury = Any work related injury or illness which prevents that person from doing any work day after accident.


3) Injury Frequency Rate = (No. of accident x 1,000,000) / No. of hours worked (since the last injury)

It's important that we, as a Safety Officer provides correct information to our employer on the correct definition of the terms used in Safety. We are the professionals right? The following treatments are considered first aid and are not to be counted as recordable injury cases:

• Non-prescription medication at non-prescription strength
• Tetanus immunizations
• Cleaning, flushing, soaking surface wounds
• Wound coverings, butterfly bandages, steri-strips (not closure devices such as sutures,
stitches or staples)
• Hot or cold therapy
• Non-rigid means of support
• Temporary immobilization device used to transport accident victims
• Drilling fingernail or toenail, draining fluid from blister
• Eye patches
• Removing foreign bodies from the eye with only irrigation or cotton swab
• Removing splinters or other foreign material from areas other than the eye by irrigation,
tweezers, cotton swabs or other simple means
• Finger guards
• Massages
• Fluids to relieve heat stress


These statistics are especially critical to MNC organization. Most of the data that you need for the calculations usually are easily retrieved from Human Resource Department. As a Safety Officer, it's always good to keep a regular update records of all the employees in your company. Information like date join, previous medical information, records of injuries, etc. could be very helpful during an incident investigation.

Hope that my information here helps someone out. As usual, work safety & GOD bless everyone.

5 comments:

  1. Appreciate your clarification:

    Hypothetical case:
    One accident ,3 injured (2 >3D MC and 1 <3D MC. Assuming 1,000,000 manhours worked for the period.
    Which is the correct AFR?
    If we use no. of accident=1, then AFR =1
    If we use no. of injuries (>3DMC) =2
    If we use no. of injuries (all) =3



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  2. how to calculate lost time injury rate(LTIR) and total recordable injury rate (TRIR), if we have only 1 lost time incidents and 1 recordable injuries. total employees is 51 pax and man hours per pax is 2504hrs

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  3. Sir, how do I calculate AFR < 1.7 ?

    ReplyDelete