Choosing a safety knife program is a daunting yet crucial task for a company. It sets the tone for how much or how little the company values employee safety. Using proper safety knives can also eliminate the risk of workplace injuries that cut into a company’s bottom line. 

When employees are responsible for making hundreds of cuts each day, there is ample opportunity for workplace lacerations to occur. In fact, lacerations are one of the most common and costly types of workplace injuries across all types of companies, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Here are some fast facts: 

• 
  Two out of every five workplace hand injuries are caused by lacerations
• The National Safety Council (NSC) reported that over 1 million hand injuries occur each year in the United States...63% of these are from knife lacerations
• 26.74% of machinery injuries are lacerations
• 55.86% of injuries caused by hand tools are lacerations 
• Lacerations are high up on a company’s list of recordables -- usually in the top three or five items
• According to an NSC study, lacerations cause an average of six lost working days for the injured worker

There’s no doubt that workplace injuries cut into a company’s bottom line, but by how much? The numbers are higher than you think. While it’s pretty simple to calculate the direct costs -- the estimated settlement and hospital bills -- the indirect costs are more ambiguous. 

Direct Costs

• Health care (cost of mending the laceration)
• Ambulance bills and EMT treatment
• Workers’ compensation

Indirect Costs 

• Wages paid to injured workers not covered by workers' compensation
• Wage costs related to time lost/work stoppage
• Administrative time spent by supervisors following accidents
• Employee retraining
• Replacement costs
• Lost productivity related to new employee learning curves or loss of morale after an injury
• Accommodation of injured employees

With the combination of obvious and hard-to-measure costs, it is hard to tack down one specific dollar amount a company can expect to pay out per workplace laceration injury. However, there are a few reliable overall statistics from the NSC that have harrowing implications about the cost of a laceration:

• The average direct cost of a hospital bill for a laceration is $10,000 (not including stitches -- usually an extra $2,000)
• The cost of one disabling hand or finger injury varies from $540 to $26,000 per patient, with a series upward extremity trauma averaging $730,000 per incident
• The average hand injury claim is $6,000, and individual workers’ compensation claims reach nearly $7,500
• The average combined direct and indirect cost of a laceration is estimated at over $32,000

Overall, each individual company will be uniquely affected by a workplace laceration injury. The amount of money lost from the bottom line depends on a variety of company- and injury- specific factors. For a more clear estimate about what this looks like for your company, you can use the OSHA’s injury calculator to see the sobering impacts of theoretical workplace injuries.

Causes

• There are many factors that increase the risk of a workplace laceration, including: 
• Inadequate workstation lighting
• Poor workplace set up
• Improper use of tools
• Incorrect PPE used for the job
• Lack of a comprehensive knife safety program that includes retractable blades
• Improper maintenance and storage of blades and knives 
• Distractions

Prevention

Knowing the staggeringly high amounts of money a company could be out if an employee is injured on the job, prevention becomes key. The cost of safety includes the cost of the safety equipment employees are outfitted with, the cost of researching and developing the safety program, and the cost of developing and/or running training presentations. Investing in good safety equipment and programs might pose a high up-front cost, but they could save a company hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

When it comes to implementing a safety program, many company leaders prioritize safety equipment like gloves over safety knives. Gloves and other equipment are certainly a valuable safety practice, but while they are resistant to workplace injuries, they do not completely eliminate them. That’s because a glove covers only a small percentage of the body. Safety knives, on the other hand, are specifically designed to offer extreme protection. Overall, we recommend using safety knives and gloves in tandem to best protect employees.

In implementing a comprehensive knife safety program, company leaders are choosing to promote both the safety of their employees and the company’s bottomline. They should make sure employees are cutting with fully automatic retractable knives and concealed blade knives. That way, if an employee’s hand slips while using the blade, the blade will retract and the risk of a serious arm or thigh laceration is mitigated. Using a retractable blade is the only way to completely prevent lacerations, so ultimately, an investment in knife safety means an investment in productivity.