What Is DART Rate
DART rate is one of the safety KPI’s (Key performance indicator) and means “Days Away, Restricted or Transferred”. It helps employers determine how many workplace injuries and illnesses required employees to miss work, perform restricted work activities or transfer to another job within a calendar year.
Deducing this rate is one of the ways of measuring the effectiveness of the safety management program and assessing the impact of incidents on the overall organization’s performance.
DART rate is said to provide more insight into the effect of incidents on the organization than the TRIR (Total Recordable Incident Rate). This is because it do not just take into account all the recordable incidents, but it consider the details of the outcome of the incidents.
DART takes into consideration:
- Incidents which kept a worker away from work
- Incident which restricted the worker from performing some task associated with his/her job.
- Incidents which made a worker to be transferred from his/her normal duty to another duty; maybe lighter duty.
Based on the DART results, the management can seek ways to review the safety program for better implementation.
Read Also: See how LTIFR is calculated from LTI (Lost time injury)
How To Calculate DART Rate
OSHA stipulate that DART rate should be calculated thus:
DART rate formula
| (Total number of incidents or illnesses resulting in either the worker missing work, being on restricted duty, or being transferred to another job within the organization x 200,000) |
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| The total number of hours worked by all employees |
The choice of 200,000 as a constant multiplication factor is because OSHA assume the value represents the number of hours worked by 100 employees for an entire year.
Difference between DART’s Rate And TRIR
Though the DART’s rate and the TRIR are almost the same, the calculation parameters are different.
Here are the slight differences:
- Where the TRIR uses – (Total recordable incidents) while DART’s rate uses – (Total number of incidents or illnesses resulting in either the worker missing work, being on restricted duty, or being transferred to another job)
- TRIR is always expected to be higher than the DART.
Someone may ask:
How do i determine “Total number of incidents or illnesses resulting in either the worker missing work, being on restricted duty, or being transferred to another job”?
This is a valid question.
There may be cases where one incident result to missing work and restricted duty or transfer.
In such case, the incident is taken as ONE.
N/B: One incident just duplicated itself in two or more ways, hence it should be taken as one incident, not to be duplicated.
To determine “Total number of incidents or illnesses resulting in either the worker missing work, being on restricted duty, or being transferred to another job” – Just count the number of incident that falls into this category without repetition.
Read Also: Environmental Health and Safety (EHS)
