How do Your Workplace Injury Rates Measure up?

The results from the 2018 Safety Benchmarking are in!

Our long term trends indicate that injury rates are overall going down, but the small observed increase this year could call for caution not to get too comfortable.

Graph: 5-year LTI-rate, MTI-rate and TRI-rate average

Workers compensation premiums also continue to decrease, whilst the number of safety personnel (e.g. No. OHS Staff/100 employees) has increased back to almost one (1) as has been consistently observed for many years.

What Activities Lead to the Most Benefit?

This year we introduced a series of questions to determine what activities lead to the most benefit and found that the top 4 things to have in place to improve safety performance are:

• Key risk register.

• 5 to 10-year strategy/vision.

• Independent safety advisor informs health and safety.

• Conducting 3 yearly external audits.

Some activities like; having a safety system, board reporting and doing internal safety audits did not raise safety performance above average, yet its absence significantly reduced performance.

Prosecutions Up and Individuals Being Jailed

Three people have been sentenced to jail this year already.

Courts and the community are getting tougher on people who cause or allow others to be injured at work.

A review of Australia’s safety prosecutions over the 2017/2018 financial year showed a 17% increase in the number of prosecutions, especially those against individuals.

The increased prosecution on individuals is likely to increase with the movement of more state adopting industrial manslaughter laws.

There was also an increase in prosecutions relating to:

• Design

• Load Restraint

• Bullying/Stress/Harassment

These increases were in alignment with the Work Safe authority’s focus in each state and the increased obligations on businesses to ensure chain of responsibility, safe design and mental health.

Types of Prosecution 2018 Benchmark

Overall the total value of fines has increased by over $5.6 million dollars on the previous year, with an average increase of around $14,000 per prosecution.

The average fine for a prosecution for 17/18 FY was $85,000.

The highest fine observed was over $1.1 million and related to unsafe plant.