Innovation and intervention to prevent workplace accidents

Construction sites, hazardous chemical facilities and sites with mobile plat equipment are some of the workplaces targeted  in a new High-risk Workplace Strategy launched by the NSW Government today.

The strategy utilises current and historical data to identify risk trends within industries, which will then allow SafeWork to run targeted programs so that there is a better chance of intervening before an incident occurs.

Minister for Better Regulation and Innovation Kevin Anderson said the strategy is part of a commitment to reduce fatalities and serious injuries at work.

“The High-Risk Workplaces Strategy is a game changer in the fight to reduce fatalities and serious injuries,” Mr Anderson said.

“Using state-of-the-art data science, SafeWork NSW can better identify business most at risk of having a workplace incident, and then work with those businesses to remove or reduce the risk before someone gets seriously injured or killed.”

The SafeWork NSW High-Risk Workplace strategy uses a predictive model that generates a risk score for each business. When applied against last year’s data, the model has an 80 per cent success rate in predicting whether or not a business will have an incident.

“We’ve seen the devastation workplace deaths and serious injury can have on the community, which is why SafeWork NSW continues to find new and innovative ways of addressing unsafe work practises, so that everyone makes it home at the end of their shift,” Mr Anderson said.

SafeWork NSW ‘s compliance, prevention and regulatory function is guided by the Work Health and Safety Roadmap for NSW 2022.

The six-year strategy commits NSW to a 30 percent reduction is work related fatalities and a 50 per cent reduction in the incidence of serious injuries, illnesses by 2022. To date NSW is exceeding national targets and is the only state to increase its targets.