News and Updates
Month: March 2022
OSHA Renews Focus on Healthcare Facility COVID Inspections
There’s certainly been no shortage of OSHA news recently, and their most recent push is aimed at the healthcare industry. From March 9, 2022 through June 9, 2022, OSHA will begin a focused, short-term inspection initiative directed at both hospitals and skilled nursing facilities that treat or handle COVID-19 patients. The goal is to mitigate the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and all of its variants, and ensure the overall health and safety of healthcare workers who are at a higher risk of being exposed to the virus in the workplace. The initiative will supplement OSHA’s existing targeted enforcement under the National Emphasis Program (NEP) for COVID-19. OSHA will use these partial-scope inspections to gauge employer compliance efforts as well as readiness for future COVID surges. These specific inspections will also make up 15% of OSHA’s inspections in each region during the three-month period. If your business falls under the following NAICS codes: 622110 General Medical and Surgical Hospitals (NCCI Codes 8833, 9040) 622210 Psychiatric and Substance Abuse Hospitals (NCCI Codes 8833, 9040) 623110 Nursing Care Facilities/Skilled Nursing Facilities (NCCI Codes 8824, 8826) 623312 Assisted Living Facilities for the Elderly (NCCI Codes 8824, 8826) And also meets any of these criteria: Follow-up inspection of any prior inspection where a COVID-19-related citation or hazard alert letter (HAL) was issued; Follow-up or monitoring inspections
Department of Labor Ramps Up Audits
The Department of Labor (DOL) will once again be on the prowl for both FMLA and Wage & Hour violations in the coming year – especially in the logistics and warehousing industries. Employers across all industries saw an uptick of audits back in 2014, when DOL made good on their promise to increase the frequency of investigations. There was a notable decline in these audits during the last administration, but expect to see them start ramping back up – and be ready! We’ve often been told by employers, “We just let employees take what they need when they need it.” This usually means, “We don’t really track unpaid leave.” If you’re a small, private employer offering FMLA-adjacent leave out of the goodness of your heart - no harm, no foul. If you’re a public employer, or a private employer with more than 50 full time employees within a 75 mile radius – that lax approach won’t cut it when the government comes calling. Here are some good questions to help determine how compliant your business is: Do FMLA regulations apply to your organization? Do you have a written FMLA policy in place? Does the policy address/define: eligibility requirements, call-in procedures, employee obligations & rights, medical certification process and outside work restrictions while on leave? Do you have legally compliant FMLA forms in place? Is your FMLA poster displayed somewhere prominen
OSHA Site Specific Targeting (SST)
The Site-Specific Targeting (SST) plan is OSHA’s main site-specific programmed inspection initiative for non-construction workplaces that have 20 or more employees. OSHA will generate inspection lists based on elevated Days Away, Restricted, or Transferred (DART) rates for 2019, and sites with upward trending rates for the three-year range of 2017-2019. They will also identify a random sample of establishments that did not provide them the required 2017, 2018, and 2019 Form 300A data. To verify data accuracy and quality control, OSHA also intends to include a random sample of low-rate establishments from the 2019 data. 1. High-Rate Establishments The SST plan selects individual establishments for inspection based on 2019 Form 300A data. Since average DART rates vary widely among industries, OSHA will set one DART rate for manufacturing and a different DART rate for non-manufacturing as objective selection criteria. 2. Upward Trending Establishments OSHA will identify establishments with rates above their industry’s national average in 2017 that have continued to trend upward in both 2018 and 2019 and continue to remain above their industry’s national average. 3. Low-Rate Establishments To verify the reliability of the Form 300A data reported to OSHA, the agency will generate a random sample of establishments with low DART rates using the 2019
Spooner Safety Seminars Are Back In Session
ATTENTION Group and Group Retro Clients: Spooner Safety Seminars are back on the road! Following a lengthy hiatus, our team is eager to get back on the road educating employers and helping you fulfill your required training credits with BWC. See below to find out when our team will be in your area and get signed up before the March 29 registration deadline. Cleveland Area: April 5th 2022, 10 AM – 12 PM @ Holiday Inn, 6001 Rockside Rd, Independence, OH 44131 ***This session has reached capacity. If you need help locating another 2 hour session in your region, please reach out to our safety team!*** Dayton/Cincinnati Area: April 6th 2022, 10 AM – 12 PM @ Hilton Garden Inn South-Austin Landing, 12000 Innovation Dr, Miamisburg, OH 45342 Columbus Area: April 6th 2022, 3 PM – 5 PM @ Embassy Suites, 5100 Upper Metro Place, Dublin, OH 43017 Youngstown Area: April 7th 2022, 10 AM – 12 PM @ A La Cart Catering, 429 Lisbon St, Canfield, OH 44406 To register online, click here. NOTE: Registration deadline is Tues 3/29/22, 11:59 PM All employers are welcome to attend these informative workplace safety seminars. The training sessions will satisfy BWC’s 2-hour safety training requirement for companies in Group Rating or Group Retrospective Rating for the 2021 policy year, and are approved for continuing education credits for those with HR credentials. The attendance fee is $35.00/person – this will be invoiced after your attenda
How SuretyHR Fits Into the Spooner Family
You may have noticed some of the SuretyHR content looks a lot like the content published on Spooner Inc’s website and LinkedIn. Maybe you also picked up on our employees having multiple logos on their emails, or you might have both Surety and Spooner business cards for the same employee. We get plenty of questions about this, so we want to help you make sense of it all. Surety HR is part of the Spooner Risk Control family of companies. Spooner Inc (our TPA) and Spooner Medical Administrators (our MCO) both have long and storied histories of helping employers navigate the claimant-favoring, monopolistic Ohio workers’ compensation system. We’ve saved thousands of companies hundreds of thousands of dollars, with some even into the millions with our claims and program management. As Ohio BWC continued making changes to programs, eligibility and inflating administrative costs, we found that offering solutions for only our state-fund and self-insured clients wasn’t enough. Enter SuretyHR, our professional employer organization (PEO). We began building the departments that would make up Surety HR in 2015, with the addition of payroll services. By 2017, we had added in-house legal counsel, HR experts and additional support to our existing teams handling workers’ comp, safety, unemployment, and absence management. In September 2019, we were granted self-insured status by Ohio BWC, which greatly increased the amount of savings we could
Ohio BWC Proposes Another Base Rate Adjustment
The Ohio BWC recently proposed an overall decrease in the statewide base rates of 10% for private employers in the policy year beginning July 1, 2022. This is projected to reduce premium collections by approximately $106 million, based on projected payroll levels of $140 billion. These “rate reduction” proposals get a lot of press, but what BWC doesn’t promote is that not all base rates will be reduced if this is approved. Rates for certain manual codes will actually be increasing in several industries. The most impacted industries will be construction, manufacturing, transportation and agriculture – but that’s just naming a few. When we meet with employers to review our in-depth analysis of their workers’ comp policy, we often find that they don’t know how their premiums are calculated. Base rates fluctuating doesn’t mean much if you don’t understand how it impacts your premiums – and subsequently, your bottom line. Every type of work is assigned a manual code, and each of those codes is assigned a monetary value (base rate) that correlates with how risky the work is. Every hundred dollars of payroll under each code is multiplied by that rate. If your policy is penalty rated, that acts as as additional multiplier. Here’s an example: NCCI Class Code Estimated Payroll Base Rate Projected Individual Rate Projected Individual
