President Obama has announced a four-year “POWER” initiative – Protecting Our Workers and Ensuring Reemployment – designed in part to avoid workers compensation costs which reached $1.6 billion in fiscal 2009.
Federal employees including postal employees filed over 79,000 new claims last year, many for work-related injuries and illnesses the memo says are preventable.
It said the initiative would extend prior workplace safety and health efforts of the federal government by setting more aggressive performance targets, encouraging the collection and analysis of data on the causes and consequences of frequent or severe injury and illness, and prioritizing safety and health management programs that have proven effective in the past.
Executive departments and agencies will be expected to improve performance as well as coordinate with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs to establish performance targets in the following areas:
* reducing total injury and illness case rates;
* reducing lost time injury and illness case rates;
* analyzing lost time injury and illness data;
* increasing the timely filing of workers’ compensation claims;
* increasing the timely filing of wage*loss claims;
* reducing lost production day rates; and,
* speeding employees’ return to work in cases of serious injury or illness.
