Rancho Mesa's Alyssa Burley and Media Communications & Client Services Coordinator Lauren Stumpf talk about how to see incident trends and proactively assign training to employees to avoid future claims.

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Director/Producer/Host: Alyssa Burley

Guest: Lauren Stumpf

Editor: Megan Lockhart

Music: "Home" by JHS Pedals, “News Room News” by Spence

Transcript

[Introduction Music]

Alyssa Burley: Hi, this is Alyssa Burley with Rancho Mesa’s Media Communications and Clients Services Department. Thanks for tuning in to today’s top Rancho Mesa news brought to you by our safety and risk management network, StudioOne™.
Welcome back everyone. Today, my guest is Lauren Stumpf, Media Communications and Client Services Coordinator with Rancho Mesa. Today, we’re going to talk about how to see incident trends and proactively assign training to employees to avoid future claims. Lauren, welcome to the show.

Lauren Stumpf: Thank you, it’s good to be back.

AB: Whether a business operates in the construction industry or serves an underprivileged segment of our community, employees of organizations will get hurt from time to time, while on the job. Even with the most safety-oriented groups, it’s possible to have incidents.

Lauren, will you explain why incident trending is important for business owners?

LS: Of course, looking at data from past incidents like workers’ compensation claims, auto accidents, even property claims, can give the business owners an indication of incidents that could reoccur in the future, if nothing is done to prevent them from happening again.

It’s a way to evaluate the overall safety of an organization and see bigger issues.

AB: Right, and if we can identify the bigger issues, we can find solutions before another incident occurs. Regardless if you’re a Rancho Mesa client, listeners should be evaluating this data. How do Rancho Mesa clients track incident trends in the Risk Management Center?

LS: Yes, great point. Incidents should not only be tracked, but this data should be analyzed. Incident trends are automatically populated in the Risk Management Center as the user is documenting the incident details for their OSHA logs and internal records. So, there aren’t extra steps that are required. If you’ve entered the data in the Risk Management Center to complete the OSHA logs and your records, the Risk Management Center will pull the data and display it on the Trending screen.
AB: Okay, let’s use a worker’s compensation claim as an example. The employee slips and falls while on the job and hurts their wrist in the fall. There was water on the floor maybe that wasn’t properly cleaned up. So, the safety manager enters the claim information into the Risk Management Center. What does the safety manager do next?

LS: Well, ideally, the safety manager, supervisor, business owner or whomever is responsible for analyzing the data, will login to the Risk Management Center and evaluate the trend data.

First, you’ll filter by incident type. Do you want to look at work comp, auto, or property claims? Then, choose to evaluate the data by area of the body, by the employees’ classification, position or department. You can look at the data by the employee’s tenure. We know, generally, newer employees are more likely to be injured on the job than employees with more experience. By looking at the trends, you’ll be able to see if that statistic is true for your organization. If it is, you now know that you should spend more time training new employees.

The data can even be evaluated by the month, day of week or time of day the injuries occurs. Are more injuries happening in the summer months or around winter? Are employees more likely to get hurt in the morning or afternoons? Are the injuries happening during the middle of week or typically on Friday afternoons? This data can help you see the trends. It will also identify employees who have had multiple claims.
AB: Can you customize the data that is displayed?

LS: Yes absolutely, by default, there are charts and graphs that display data we think you’ll want to see. But you can create your own charts and graphs by telling the system what data you want to pull. So, it can get pretty sophisticated if you need it to.

AB: So, once the business owner or safety manager has the trend data, what do they do with it?

LS: That’s a great question. It does nothing to help the company if you have access to the data but you don’t do anything with it. So, once you see a trend, it’s time to address the issue.

You may find after analyzing the data that there is a common root cause for several different incidents that seemed on the surface to be unrelated. However, since you have got the data in a usable form, it’s clear where the real problem is and it can be addressed with environmental changes, administrative controls and/or training to prevent future incidents.

An example might be an employee needs to change out a light bulb. They went to get the ladder and noticed that a piece of plastic on the ladder has cracked, so they decide to stand on an office chair instead. The chair moves while they are standing on it and the employee falls and hurts their wrist. Another employee attempts to use the broken ladder and pinches their hand in between the cracked plastic. These two incidents may not seem related, but both stem from the ladder being broken and no one notifying management to have it removed and replaced. Training should be done on how to evaluate a ladder before use and what to do if it is not safe to use.

AB: We often assume that we’d notice trends like that, but sometimes they may be a little harder to identify. So, using the Risk Management Center to identify the bigger issue can help you prevent future claims.

[Closing Music]

Lauren, thank you so much for joining me in StudioOne™.

LS: Thanks for having me.

AB: This is Alyssa Burley with Rancho Mesa. Thanks for tuning in to our latest episode produced by StudioOne™. For more information, visit us at ranchomesa.com and subscribe to our weekly newsletter.