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Work-Related Injuries & Illnesses

​All work-related injuries and illnesses at the NIH must be reported to your local NIH Division of Occupatio​nal Medical Service (DOMS)​. 

​Click below for Procedures for Lab-Related Injuries or Exposures:

You may also report your work-related injury or illness using the myCority application, which is only accessible on the NIH network; or by calling DOMS at 301-496-4411. Please note, myCority is only monitored during DOMS business hours.

For urgent matters (i.e. blood and body fluid exposures, animal bites, exposure to biological or chemical hazards, and serious injuries that require hospitalization) that occur after hours, please call 301-496-1211 to have the DOMS on-call provider paged.

In addition to providing care for the injured worker, OMS staff works closely with safety specialists assigned to your Institute or Center to minimize the potential for other workers to be similarly injured.​

Injury and Illness Investigation

When a work-related injury or illness occurs, it is important that we investigate why it happened so we can suggest changes to prevent a similar incident from happening again. Most injuries and illnesses are preventable. The purpose of our investigation is not to assign blame, but to identify contributing factors which can then be controlled. Similar incidents can be avoided in the future by identifying the factors that led to the incident and then changing the conditions or actions.

​Select one of the links below for more information:

​The Investigation Process

At the NIH, when you report to NIH Division of Occupational Medical Service (DOMS)  that you had a work-related incident that resulted in an injury or illness, the basic facts (who, what, when, and where) are shared with specific individuals in our organization who review each incident and try to determine the why and how – why it happened and how to stop it from happening again. Most incidents are investigated either by your supervisor, us or both.  The information is shared only with those with a need-to-know, maintaining confidentiality while still meeting workers' compensation and OSHA requirements. If you are a contractor, we work with your management to ensure that your employer investigates and addresses concerns within their control.
 

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Our Illness & Injury Investigation Reporting Process

 The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) established a reporting process for each employer to collect the injury/illness data and share it with workers. Each year from February 1 to April 30 each employer must share certain injury/illness information with employees. At the NIH, the data is posted on our website categorized by work location, as required by OSHA. 

Summaries of work-related injuries and illnesses are shared with external Institute/Center Safety Committees so that they may help identify trends and establish processes to prevent recurrence, and to share the learning opportunities more widely. Data and summaries are always modified so that personal identifiers are NOT associated with a report.

We use several mechanisms to identify trends and establish programs to attempt to reduce future incidents. Your IC Safety Specialists have the best point of contact to get this information. We also prepare a Workplace Injury and Illness Trend Analysis.
 

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Workplace Injury and Illness Trend Analysis

Our Workplace Injury and Illness Trend Analysis Program strives to identify unhealthy behaviors or hazardous conditions by tracking work-related injuries and illnesses. This information is used to target Division of Safety education activities to prevent or reduce future employee work-related injuries and illnesses. Workplace Injury and Illness Trend Analysis include the following:

  • Tracking and monitoring workplace injuries and illnesses on an on-going basis.
  • Determining if any trends in workplace injuries or illnesses exist and graphing those trends if possible.
  • Identifying any equipment, materials, or environmental factors that may be commonly involved in workplace injury or illness incidents.
  • Identifying possible solutions and suggesting improvements to reduce or prevent the likelihood of future workplace injuries or illnesses.
  • Reviewing data for quality assurance.
  • Monitoring safety program leading and lagging indicators (i.e. training, workers compensation cost, OSHA case rates, etc.).

To find out how we can help you improve healthy behaviors, eliminate hazardous conditions, and prevent or reduce employee work-related injuries and illnesses, contact your Safety Specialist.

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