WASHINGTON – According to a final rule recently announced by the U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration, employers are now required to notify OSHA when an employee is killed on the job or suffers a work-related hospitalization, amputation or loss of an eye.

Under the revised rule, employers will be required to notify OSHA of work-related fatalities within eight hours, and work-related in-patient hospitalizations, amputations or losses of an eye within 24 hours. Reporting single hospitalizations, amputations or loss of an eye was not required under the previous rule.

The rule goes into effect January 1, 2015, for workplaces under federal OSHA jurisdiction, and also updates the list of employers partially exempt from OSHA record-keeping requirements. The new rule uses the North American Industry Classification System to classify establishments by industry, is based on updated injury and illness data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and maintains the exemption for any employer with 10 or fewer employees, regardless of industry classification, from the requirement to routinely keep records of worker injuries and illnesses.

All employers covered by the Occupational Safety and Health Act, even those exempt from maintaining injury and illness records, are required to comply with OSHA's new severe injury and illness reporting requirements. To assist employers in fulfilling these requirements, OSHA is developing a Web portal for employers to report incidents electronically, as well as the phone reporting options.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 4,405 workers were killed on the job in 2013.