Preventing injuries at work
Working in the world of health and safety, especially in high-risk industries, can often result in an odd sleepless night.
Despite all our advances in technology and workplace safety protocols and training programs, we know that inevitably work-related injury will occur.
Thankfully in Australia, work-related fatalities have decreased by 50 percent since the 2007 high*, with 194 deaths in 2019–20, which accounted for around 1.5 deaths per 100,000 workers.
According to Safe Work Australia, in 2019–20 there were more than 120,000 serious work-related disease or injury claims made. The incidence rate of serious injury claims per 1000 workers was highest in the high-risk industries of agriculture, forestry and fishing, manufacturing and transport, and postal and warehousing. Body stressing and falls, slips and trips were still the top two causes of serious injury.
So how do some of the world’s leading organisations tackle workplace injury prevention?
We spoke about injury prevention with Sarah Cuscadden, a global health and safety leader, most recently recognised as one of the 40 under 40 in the health and safety world.
Sarah has worked for big high-risk organisations throughout her career and shared with us some of her best tips for when it comes to designing safety engagement programs that address injury.
When you start to talk about really caring for people, rather than just talking about safety, some of the roadblocks to implementing safety programs disappear.
A good safety engagement program begins even before a person is hired, safety conversations are a proactive part of recruitment, onboarding and induction — rather than being done reactively after an injury occurs.
The injury data tells part of the story, but working collaboratively with frontline staff to resolve challenges is a far better approach than looking at data and then telling people what they need to do.
Check out our 6-minute SafeTea chat with Sarah Cuscadden, which was recorded as part of Everyday Massive’s National Safe Work Month series.
*Safe Work Australia Key WHS statistics Australia 2021
