President takes aim at Fed worker injuries
Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010
On July 19, 2010, President Obama announced a 4-year initiative to combat the high number of workers' compensation claims logged by federal government employees each year.
Protecting Our Workers and Ensuring Reemployment (POWER) will extend current job-safety efforts by setting more aggressive targets, encouraging the review of data on incident causes, and prioritizing safety and health management programs that have worked in the past.
Under POWER, executive departments and agencies will be expected to improve their performance in areas including:
- Reducing total injury and illness case rates
- Reducing lost-time injuries
- Analyzing lost-time injury and illness data
- Increasing the timely filing of workers’ comp claims
- Increasing the timely filing of wage-loss claims
- Reducing lost production day rates
- Speeding return-to-work in cases of serious injury or illness
According to a presidential memorandum outlining the program, the initiative will be led by the Secretary of Labor, who has been charged with measuring governmentwide and agency-level performance and reporting annually to the president.
Source: Safety.BLR.com
