We use minor injury & Riddor cases as the two catagories

Why would you have a 3rd Major / non-Riddor category?

We see plenty of confusion regarding what a Riddor injury is on this website

It must be confusing to create a second boundary

It would depend upon the individual and the "extent" of the dislocation.

We had one operative with rather loose joints (in a previous era they would have been a side show performer) who could pop & restore their joints at will.

Another individual the local A&E was involved and the operative was back at work the next shift.

Then there was a dislocation with complications impacting blood supply & nerve damage - months later and they are still limping.

Summing up there needs to be impact absence and/or on-going medical issue to be anything other than minor.

Aside from whether it is reportable / recordable according to legal criteria, the only other options I have ever used or seen used to categorise the severity of the injury relate to the consequence of the injury, not its nature.  So whether first aid was needed, whether there was lost time and so on.

Of course the nature of injury is often also categorised (cut, burn, fracture etc) and there's no reason why dislocation can't be such a category.  But just as a cut can be anything from trivial to very serious, so can a dislocation (as described in the examples above). 

The severity of injury and the nature of the injury are two independent ways of categorising injuries and you can apply both at the same time.

Hi Bill

Taking account of Roundtuit's point that some dislocations may be very serious, some quite minor, one (relatively crude) way you might distinguish between severities would be to follow the OSHA route (as many organisations do either because of OSHA Regulations or other reasons) and count the number of Days Lost (usually NOT counting the day of the accident).

Most would stop the clock at 365 days which is also the number of Days notionally lost after an accident which results in fatality.[Even that is further complicated by counting the number of days from the day after the accident when the victim might still be alive for up to 365 days - so they might have X days ACTUALLY lost + Y NOTIONALLY lost]

In simple terms it gives you the option to work out your stats for e.g. the mean average number of days lost after an accident at work, or to calculate what proportion of those accidents might be "Serious Injuries and Fatalities" resulting in more than N days lost.

I am NOT suggesting you do any of this. In my view almost all the accident data analysis done by organisations for their own use is largely wasted resources. Very rarely wil an organisation be able to detect any signficantly significant trends in performance via accident data in less than periods of years or decades.

Useful statistical analysis is largely dependent on having huge amounts of data to play with. Most organisatioins SHOULDN'T have it and if they do they should be addressing the problemes, not playing numbers games!!!