The Construction Safety Threat Assessment and Reporting (C-STAR) Framework: A Severity-Based Risk Scoring Model Using OSHA Severe Injury Reports

Background: OSHA’s Severe Injury Reporting (SIR) program captures high-severity construction outcomes such as in-patient hospitalization and amputation. However, prevention prioritization commonly relies on incident counts that do not simultaneously represent injury severity, persistence of hazard mechanisms, and access-context conditions related to enforcement and training resources.  Methods: This paper presents the Construction Safety Threat Assessment and Reporting (C-STAR) framework—an interpretable severity-based scoring model that converts each SIR record into an incident-level Severe Incident Safety Score (SISS) by summing three factors: OSHA Regulatory Compliance context (ORC), Hazard Incident Severity (HIS), and Hazard Recurrence Probability (HRP). Incident scores are further aggregated to compute a regional-level Regional Safety Risk Score (RSRS) for comparative profiling.  Results: C-STAR defines transparent subfactor rules and fixed score ranges, producing interpretable outputs suitable for ranking, tiering, and sensitivity testing by varying scoring assumptions using secondary data only.  Conclusions: C-STAR provides a replicable decision-support approach for translating severe injury surveillance into structured risk scoring for prioritization and planning. GIS-based visualization is an optional downstream application of these GIS-ready outputs rather than a required component of the framework.