WorkSafe triages for effective results

Over the past three financial years, WorkSafe’s Customer Help Centre has dealt with more than 80,000 calls and emails per year.

In the 2017-18 financial year, WorkSafe received 1,853 notifications of injuries and illnesses, and this number increased to 2,308 in 2018-19.

Reports of hazards, injuries and illnesses must all be assigned a priority with consideration to the best possible use of resources. Appropriate choices are made as to where resources are applied. The greater share of resources is devoted to the more serious circumstances.

The factors that are considered when deciding whether an investigation will take place include:

compliance with legislation causes whether action has been taken or needs to be taken to prevent a recurrence and to secure compliance with the law lessons to be learnt and to influence the law and guidance what response is appropriate to an alleged breach of the law.

In selecting which complaints or reports to investigate and what resources to assign, the following factors are taken into account:

severity and scale of potential or actual harm seriousness of any potential breach of the law duty holder’s compliance history, including prior convictions and notices issued high risk and strategic enforcement priorities practicality of achieving results wider relevance of the event, including matters of significant community concern or emerging issues nature and quality of the information provided knowledge of the effectiveness of any consultative mechanism used at the workplace.

In deciding whether any further investigation should take place, priority areas include:

work-related fatalities and serious injuries or health effects, and where there is a risk of such consequences non-compliance with notices or directions offences against or obstruction of inspectors offences against persons exercising OSH responsibilities at the workplace (e.g. safety and health representatives or other persons authorised under the legislation) discrimination against employees on the basis of their OSH activities failure to notify incidents breaches of the consultative provisions of the Act.

If an inspection or investigation reveals any breach of workplace safety laws, including failing to report a notifiable injury or illness, appropriate enforcement action is taken. This can include improvement notices, prohibition notices, prosecution action, other sanctions or a combination of these.