Injury Severity Rate

What Does Injury Severity Rate Mean?

The injury severity rate represents the number of lost work days experienced per 100 workers. As the name implies, the injury severity rate attempts to measure how critical the injuries and illnesses experienced by a certain group of employees (in a given workplace or across an entire industry) by using the number of days lost as a proxy for severity.

Injury severity rate can be calculated by the following formula:

Injury severity rate = (number of work days lost + light duty days lost) x 200,000 / total hours worked.

Safeopedia Explains Injury Severity Rate

The frequency of injuries is an important safety metric, but without knowing how severe those injuries are, companies have an incomplete picture of their safety performance. Some injuries impede productivity and escalate costs far more than others, and this should be taken into consideration.

Tracking injury severity allows safety professionals to identify some of the biggest dangers in the workplace and take steps to eliminate or control them.