Scope and Coverage:

Besides injury and illness counts summary data, survey respondents also are asked to provide additional information for a subset of the most serious nonfatal cases logged. These cases primarily involve at least one day away from work, beyond the day of injury or onset of illness. Employers answer several questions about these cases, including the demographics of the worker disabled, the nature of the disabling condition, and the event and source producing that condition.

Definitions:

Most employers use information from supplementary record keeping forms and State workers' compensation claims to fill out the Survey's "case" form; some, however, attach those forms when their narratives answer questions on the case form, an option the Bureau offers to help reduce respondent burden. Also, to minimize the burden of many larger employers, sampled establishments projected to have large numbers of cases involving days away from work receive instructions on how to sample those cases. The Bureau developed a new Occupational Injury and Illness Classification System to permit standardized and uniform coding of the injury or illness involving days away from work and the way it occurred. The major code structures of that system are:

• Nature of injury or illness, or the principal physical characteristic of the worker's injury or illness;

• Part of the body directly affected by the injury or illness;

• Source of injury or illness, that is, the object, substance, bodily motion, or work environment which directly produced or inflicted the injury/illness;

• Event or exposure describes the manner in which the injury or illness was inflicted or produced; and

• Secondary source identifies the object, substance, or person that generated the source of injury or illness or that contributed to the event/exposure.