Posted By Dave Wilson Industry in UK use 100,000 man hours so your industry rate is 1/2 what it is if you are bench marking against other UK companies, the HSE have some stats on this I think.

Posted By Ian Waldram The UK standard is 100K hours, the US standard 200K, companies tend to use one or the other depending on their background. One problem is that this type of counting began when many organisations paid workers by the hour and thus recorded hours worked in some detail. Now that 'clocking on' is a thing of the past, very few organisations keep such records, and even fewer managers have a feel for what 100 or 200K hours is in terms of real people. Thus the danger is that this type of calculation becomes a matter for 'safety experts' and of no real value to anyone else. However most managers can envisage what 100 people look like and know whether 'their patch' is larger or smaller than that. In our guidance on public reporting (see 'Technical Information', upper left), IOSH recommends that injury rates are quoted per 100 full-time employees. We don't like the HSE rate of per 100,000 employees because very few organisations employ such large numbers - they may be OK for comparing employment sectors, but not individual organisations or sites. In any case, if you check the HSE data, nearly all their figures are in the thousands per 100,000 - so that's exactly the same as in units per 100, e.g. the UK average LTA rate is about 1 per 100 employees per year. An annual rate of 0.1 is getting very good. For organisations which do find it easy to count actual hours (most count their employees and multiply by a fixed number of hours per employee - so why not just quote rates per 100 employees!), 100 people work around 200,000 hours per year - so you can compare a rate per 100 employees directly with a US standard injury rate. (Some people argue that 100 employees probably work nearer to 180,000 hours - but no one should be bothered about the resulting small differences, as we all know LTA rate is a crude performance measure anyway.) And whilst on this subject, remember that IOSH also recommends all organisations should publish data for all employees, whether contracted or direct - as it is very often their contractors who are at higher risk because they have a higher proportion of on-site activities.