Occupational Injury and Illness Classification Manual 
 
The Bureau of Labor Statistics developed the Occupational 
Injury and Illness Classification System (OIICS) to 
provide a set of procedures for selecting and recording 
facts relating to an occupational injury or illness.  
Uniformly coded data provide safety and health 
professionals and policy analysts with information to 
develop programs designed to prevent recurrences of 
serious injuries.  BLS developed the coding scheme for 
use in the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries and the 
Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses.  In 
September 1995, the American National Standards Institute 
(ANSI) adopted the Occupational Injury and Illness 
Classification System as the national standard for 
classifying characteristics of fatal and nonfatal 
occupational injuries and illnesses.  

The five characteristics included in OIICS are: 

Nature of Injury or Illness which describes the physical 
characteristics of the injury or illness. 
Part of Body which identifies the part of the body 
directly affected by the nature. 
Source which identifies the object or substance that 
directly inflicted the injury or illness. 
Event or Exposure which describes the manner in which the 
injury or illness was inflicted by the source. 
Secondary Source which identifies the other object or 
substance that contributed to the event or exposure. 
 
The OIICS manual is divided into a table of contents and 
4 sections: 

Table of Contents 
Section 1 is an introduction to the OIICS codes. 
Section 2 include the definitions, rules of selections, 
and code titles and descriptions. 
Section 3 is a list of the codes and their titles. 
Section 4 is an alphabetical index. 

The occupational Injury and Illness Classification manual 
is available in Microsoft Word 6.0.  The manual is on the 
following two files: 
OIICM1.DOC is the Introduction, Section 1, and Section 2 
(526KB) 
OIICM2.DOC is Section 3 and Section 4 (447KB)