Workplace Safety, Health, and Risk Management
This domain tests OSHA compliance, injury recordkeeping, workers' compensation, and the risk-management process. Many items are calculations or recordability judgments.
Core rules
- General Duty Clause (Section 5(a)(1)): employers must furnish a workplace free from recognized hazards likely to cause death or serious physical harm where no specific standard applies.
- Recordkeeping: OSHA 300 log of work-related injuries and illnesses, 301 incident report, and the 300A annual summary posted February 1 through April 30. Record a case when it is work-related and results in death, days away, restricted work or transfer, medical treatment beyond first aid, loss of consciousness, or significant diagnosis.
- Reporting to OSHA: fatality within 8 hours; in-patient hospitalization, amputation, or loss of an eye within 24 hours.
- Incidence rate = (number of recordable cases × 200,000) ÷ total hours worked, where 200,000 represents 100 employees working 40 hours for 50 weeks.
- Hierarchy of controls: elimination, substitution, engineering controls, administrative controls, and personal protective equipment. PPE is the last line of defense, not the first.
- Risk management: identify, assess likelihood and severity, then avoid, reduce, transfer through insurance, or retain the risk.
- Workers' compensation is no-fault, provides medical, disability, rehabilitation, and death benefits, and is generally the employee's exclusive remedy against the employer.
- Programs: emergency action plans, employee assistance programs, wellness initiatives, workplace violence prevention, and return-to-work programs.
Worked example
A warehouse logs 8 recordable injuries while employees worked 400,000 hours. Incidence rate = (8 × 200,000) ÷ 400,000 = 4.0 per 200,000 hours, equivalent to 4.0 per 100 full-time-equivalent workers. The safety manager compares this with the industry benchmark before setting a target, then reviews which cases involved days away in order to prioritize engineering fixes over retraining.
Traps that cost marks
- Reporting to OSHA within 8 hours for all hospitalizations; the rule is 24 hours except for fatalities.
- Counting first-aid-only cases as recordable.
- Substituting 2,000 for 200,000 in the incidence-rate formula.
- Choosing PPE first because it is fast and inexpensive.
- Forgetting that workers' compensation generally bars employee tort suits against the employer.