DART rate and lost time injury rate

The calculator works out all three at once. This page is what they mean and why anybody wants both.

Three rates, one formula, narrowing counts

The arithmetic never changes. What changes is which injuries you are allowed to count.

Each row is a subset of the one above it. A case that put somebody off work is also a DART case and also a recordable. That is why the numbers descend, and why a DART above a TRIF is proof of a counting error rather than a bad year.

What DART actually stands for

Days Away, Restricted or Transferred. Three triggers, any one of which is enough.

The restricted and transferred cases are the ones people forget, and they are why DART exists as a separate measure. A company that puts injured workers on modified duties keeps them out of the lost time rate but not out of DART.

Why the gap between your numbers is the interesting part

Any single rate is a thin piece of information. The relationship between them is where a reviewer actually reads your program.

A high TRIF with a low DART says you have a fair number of injuries and most of them are minor enough that people carry on with their normal work after treatment. That is not a comfortable pattern, but it is a manageable one, and it usually points at housekeeping, hand injuries and the ordinary attrition of a busy site.

A TRIF and DART close together says most of your recordable injuries are serious enough to stop somebody doing their job. Fewer injuries, worse ones. This is the pattern that worries a prequalification reviewer, and it should worry you, because it usually means the controls that would have caught the severe events are the ones missing.

A DART well above your lost time rate is generally a good sign. It says injured workers are being kept at work on modified duties rather than sent home, which is better for recovery and better for the claim. Do not read that as a way to hide anything, because restricted duty is still recordable and still in DART. It moves the case between your rates, it does not remove it.

The lost time rate on its own

In Canada this is the number with the longest history, because it is closest to what the provincial boards publish.

It counts only cases where somebody missed time beyond the day of injury. Nothing about restricted duty, nothing about treatment.

Because it is the narrowest measure it is also the noisiest for a small company. One injury at a company of fifteen produces a lost time rate that looks alarming next to an industry average, and one clean year produces a zero that proves very little. This is a real limitation of the measure rather than a reason to distrust yours, and it is worth saying out loud in a prequalification submission when your hours are low.

Note that this is still not the same as the provincial lost time rates on the benchmarks page. Those count accepted compensation claims across a whole jurisdiction, on a different denominator. Your rate and the province's rate are different measures wearing similar names, which is the running theme of this entire hub.

Related

• Safety metrics and injury rates is the hub.
• The TRIF calculator works out all three rates together.
• What counts as a recordable injury decides what enters any of them.
• What TRIF clients actually require covers the thresholds.
• Incident and near miss reporting is where the outcome gets recorded in the first place.