Back by popular demand, our OSHA Power Brief that discusses and explains TRIR and DART:
The Skinny:
In this edition of our OSHA Power Brief series, we’ll define and discuss two critical safety performance metrics:
• TRIR: Total Recordable Incident Rate
• DART: Days Away from work, days of Restricted work activity, and/or days of jobs Transfer
Why is it important to understand these key safety metrics?
• The primarily value of TRIR and DART is to evaluate and quantify a company’s safety performance.
• Companies that meet OSHA’s record keeping requirements must calculate, report and post these values on an annual basis via OSHA 300 & 300A Logs.
• High (ie: poor) TRIR and DART scores can trigger further OSHA scrutiny such as surprise or targeted inspections, and possible fines.
• Companies (i.e. clients) often scrutinize the safety performance of vendors to help determine who they want to do business with. High scores can often result in lost business, while low scores can result in gained and/or increased business.
• These metrics can sometimes impact the cost of insurance premiums.
• Fair or not, a quick glance at a company’s TRIR and DART scores tell much, either good or bad, about a company and it’s culture.
Obviously, these two key safety performance metrics are vital and must be managed, tracked and reported in order to ensure a safe work place, reduce regulatory risk, meet customer scrutiny, and control the cost of insurance premiums.
Want to learn more? Read on….
The Details:
Before getting into the details surrounding TRIR and DART, it’s important to understand what a Recordable Incident is:
• Definition of “Recordable Cases”: All work related deaths and illnesses, and those work-related injuries which result in: death, loss of consciousness, restriction of work or motion, transfer to another job, or require medical treatment beyond first aid.
As you might have guessed, Recordable Incidents/Cases are the basis for calculating TRIR and DART.
How are TRIR and DART Calculated and what is their additional relevance?
o TRIR:
• Formula: Total Number of Recordable Cases x 200,000/divided by total hours worked by all employees during the year covered.
• Relevance:
• Allows you (as well as your customers and OSHA) to compare your injury rates to other company’s injury rates that are in businesses similar to yours.
• Companies and Customers often request and scrutinize this vital Safety Performance Indicator during the evaluation process in order to determine which contractors they want to work with!
• IMPORTANT NOTE: OSHA’s 200,000 standard annual hours benchmark unfairly penalizes smaller companies with few employees and much smaller total annual work hours. In other words, even 1 or 2 recordable injuries incurred by a smaller contractor will greatly inflate the TRIR score. Unfortunately OSHA and customers don’t normally take this into account when evaluating their contractors (and when OSHA scrutinizes safety performance records), which is another reason why it is VITAL that companies work hard to reduce injuries and illness in the workplace.
o DART:
Cases which involve Days Away from work, days of Restricted work activity, and/or days of job Transfer.
Calculation: Number of CASES with days away from work or job transfer or restrictions (cases on 300 log with either column H or I checked) multiplied by 200,000/divided by total hours worked by all employees during the year covered.
• How did OSHA come up with 200,000 as the benchmark standard for these formulas?
• It’s the equivalent of 100 employees working 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, and provides the standard base for incident rates.
Click here to learn more about OSHA compliance requirements.
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