News arrived this week that new employees get injured much more often than their more-experienced colleagues.

Joe Paduda

Travelers provided the research, which confirmed  — and added more detail — to what we already (sort of) knew: About a third of injuries happen to workers with a year or less on the job.

This makes sense. Newer workers are less experienced, have had less training, are likely younger and don’t know what they don’t know.

Not surprisingly, the incidence rate varies by industry:

• Restaurants — 53% of claims and 47% of claim costs.
• Construction — 48% of claims and 52% of claim costs.
• Services — 43% of claims and 38% of claim costs.
• Transportation — 39% of claims and 41% of claim costs.

A couple of additional observations:

• Construction is a higher-severity industry, making newer workers even more susceptible to longer-term claims.
• Hospitality, construction and transportation are higher-turnover industries, making it more likely the entire workforce is less experienced, and more of the workers are in their first year than in other sectors.

And here are related issues that deserve your attention:

• There’s a lot more turnover in employment than “normal” these days, which means more workers will be in that dangerous first year.
• Construction is ramping up with billions in spending on governmental and private projects.
• Logistics/transportation is under severe stress due to the ongoing supply chain problems.

What does this mean for you?

All these factors suggest injuries may bump up later in 2022 and into 2023.

Kudos to Travelers for the work. This is helpful indeed.

Joseph Paduda is co-owner of CompPharma, a consulting firm focused on improving pharmacy programs in workers’ compensation. This column is republished with his permission from his Managed Care Matters blog.