The California State Legislature changed the criteria for deciding what are serious jobsite occupational injuries and also altered the manner in which employers can submit injury reports, according to EHS Today. Employers in the state no longer have the option for email reporting of serious injuries, because the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) is launching a new website.
One new law amends the definition of “serious injury or illness” that is contained in state law by removing the 24-hour minimum time requirement for qualifying hospitalizations in cases where an employee suffers loss of a body part or suffers a serious degree of permanent disfigurement. The new law’s definition of these kinds of hospitalizations excludes stays for medical observation or diagnostic testing.
By deleting the time frame and simply mandating that reporting must occur when a worker’s injury requires hospitalization, legislators argue that the change will provide employers with added clarity when it comes to determining their reporting responsibilities.
Further, the law also replaces “loss of any member of the body” with “amputation,” and explicitly includes the loss of an eye as a qualifying injury. It eliminates the exclusion of an injury or illness caused by certain violations of the Penal Code, and narrows the inclusion of accidents on a public street or highway found to have occurred only in a construction zone.
The other new law changes the reporting requirement by directing employers to immediately report such incidents via telephone or through an online reporting mechanism that Cal/OSHA is in the process of creating, but which is not yet operational. Until the online reporting mechanism is available, employers will still be allowed to continue reporting serious accidents by both e-mail and telephone.
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