Problem
OSHA publishes detailed reports of incidents involving inpatient hospitalizations, amputations, and losses of an eye. The public file contained 105,996 reports from January 2015 through November 2025, but it was not ready for comparison. Industry information was stored in NAICS codes, injury details were spread across several coded fields, and the apparent geographic coverage was misleading.
I wanted to build a dashboard that made the data useful without presenting gaps in federal reporting as differences in workplace safety.
Preparing the data
I grouped NAICS codes into sectors and readable industry categories, organized incident codes into broader event and body-part groups, and created outcome fields for reports involving hospitalization, amputation, or eye loss. These fields made it possible to compare years, industries, and event types while retaining the individual report behind each total.
I also separated incident counts from the number of affected workers. One report can involve multiple hospitalized workers or more than one outcome, so those measures cannot be treated as interchangeable or added together.
Solving the coverage problem
The most important modeling issue was OSHA jurisdiction. Twenty-one states and Puerto Rico operate approved State Plans covering private-sector workers, so their incidents are not comprehensively represented in the federal file.
Michigan, for example, appears in only 72 records. That reflects reporting coverage, not a lower rate of serious injuries.
I created a geographic-coverage flag to identify jurisdictions where Federal OSHA covers private-sector workers. The dashboard defaults to the 103,504 reports from those consistently covered jurisdictions rather than combining them with states represented only by limited federal records. The excluded jurisdictions and the reason for their exclusion are named in the dashboard’s data note.
Dashboard
The Tableau dashboard presents reported incidents, reports involving hospitalization and amputation, annual trends, event types, and the industries with the most reports.
Viewers can filter by year, industry sector, and reported outcome, then open the underlying employer, location, event, and incident narrative.
Result
The finished dashboard is a public, documented analysis of severe workplace injury reports. It shows both what the federal data can answer and where its coverage limits the conclusions that can be drawn.