OSHA Injury Data: An Opportunity for Improving Work Injury Prevention

Millions of US workers are seriously injured on the job annually. These injuries have a significant and deleterious impact on injured workers, their families, and their communities. The limitations of the historical work injury surveillance systems have constrained research into the distribution and determinants of work injuries and efforts to improve allocation of limited injury prevention resources. Most work injury data sets suffer from significant limitations and fail to include a sizable proportion of work injuries. In recent years, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has begun to collect and make available to the public more detailed data on work injuries at thousands of high hazard establishments. These data sets provide the opportunity to greatly improve our work injury surveillance system. Researchers are now using these data to investigate and compare injury risk in industries and high-hazard firms where workers are at increased risk of musculoskeletal disorders. However, these rich data sets are underused. Maintaining and facilitating access to accurate, current data can contribute to improved prevention of work-related injuries and deaths. (Am J Public Health. 2025;115(4):588-595. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2024.307934).