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Workers in Pennsylvania may have heard about the changes that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has made to injury data collection. Now, recordable workplace injuries are going to be made public on the agency’s website. Publicizing companies’ work injury data could put pressure on employers to keep their work sites safer and allow analysts to find patterns in work injury statistics.

Some say that employers could do their own analysis of work injury data in order to improve the safety of their workplaces. Rather than waiting for OSHA to issue a citation, an employer may want to determine where unsafe work practices are taking place in their organization. Using that information, an employer could create safety-training courses to bridge their employees’ knowledge gaps.

New learning technologies can track results and employee behavior and then forecast trends toward specific types of work-related illnesses and injuries. Companies like Walmart and Bloomingdales have been trying to reduce the number of work accidents and illnesses at their stores by introducing short daily training sessions that can be conducted at the beginning of an employee’s shift. The training is delivered through a game-like interface and targeted to each employee’s needs.

Some work-related accidents are caused by a lack of training while others are the result of human error, third-party negligence or employer negligence. Whatever the cause of a workplace accident may be, the injured worker may file a workers’ compensation claim for medical benefits and partial wage replacement benefits. An attorney might be able to help an injured worker through the claim compensation process.