Research—
Healthcare's severe injuries look nothing like a factory's: 4,982 OSHA reports, 95% hospitalizations
Health care and social assistance employers filed 4,982 federal OSHA severe-injury reports since 2015. Almost all — 95% — are hospitalizations, and only 7% are amputations, the mirror image of manufacturing. What sends healthcare workers to the hospital instead.
Severe workplace injury does not look the same in a hospital as it does on a factory floor. Employers in NAICS sector 62 (health care and social assistance) have filed 4,982 federal OSHA severe-injury reports since 2015, and their profile is the near-opposite of the manufacturing sectors that dominate the amputation data.
Hospitalizations, not amputations
4,723 of the sector's reports — 95% — are hospitalizations, while just 352 (7%) are amputations, far below the 26% archive-wide rate. Healthcare's serious injuries are overexertion and fall events: musculoskeletal injuries from lifting and repositioning patients, slips on wet floors, and workplace-violence incidents — not the machine amputations that define food and metal manufacturing. It is a reminder that “severe injury” is shaped by the hazards of the work, and that patient-handling is one of the most injury-prone tasks in the American economy.
Where healthcare injuries concentrate
The state ranking tracks federal OSHA jurisdiction, not care quality. Each count opens the live records.
| State | Healthcare severe injuries |
|---|---|
| Florida | 594 |
| Pennsylvania | 556 |
| Texas | 461 |
Browse all 4,982 healthcare severe-injury records, or see how every sector compares in the industry ranking.
Method & source
All counts are live queries against the federal OSHA Severe Injury Report archive (events dated 2015-01-01 through 2025-10-31) indexed by Safety Incidents, which holds 105,313 reports, of which 27,770 (about 26%) are amputations. Sector figures count reports whose primary NAICS begins with 62 (health care and social assistance); hospitalization and amputation shares are of those 4,982 reports and overlap, since one injury can be coded both. Reproduce any figure by applying the same filters on the search page. Reporting has been mandatory under federal OSHA jurisdiction since January 2015; the 22 states running their own OSHA-approved plans report separately and are under-represented here — see the 22-state blind spot.