Abstract
BackgroundImproving New Zealand’s poor workplace safety record has become a high priority following high profile workplace fatal incidents in 2010 and 2014. Existing routine official data are unable to reliably inform occupational safety policy and action in New Zealand. This case review study will examine work-related fatal injury (WRFI) to: i) determine their burden, rates and distribution; ii) identify high-risk groups, causes and circumstances; iii) analyse secular trends, and iv) examine the impact of historic occupational safety legislative reform.Design and methodsA comprehensive New Zealand WRFI dataset from 1975 to 2014 will be established using existing data for 1975–1994 combined with new data for 1995–2014 extracted from reviewed coronial case files. Data collection involves: 1) identifying likely cases of WRFI from national mortality records using selected injury external cause codes; 2) linking these to coronial case files, which will be retrieved and reviewed to determine work-relatedness; and 3) coding work-related cases. Annual WRFI frequencies and rates will be calculated and disaggregated by age, sex, employment status, occupation and industry to identify high-risk groups and compared across the time series. The circumstances of the WRFIs will be analysed in-depth. The impact of New Zealand’s Health and Safety in Employment 1992 Act, which resulted in deregulation of the previous legislative frameworks for occupational health and safety during a period of rapid labour market restructuring, will be examined by comparing rates before and after implementation of the Act.DiscussionThe resulting evidence will serve as the basis for policy development and practical interventions to reduce WRFI, targeting groups of high-risk workers, and for bench-marking of workplace safety performance in New Zealand.
Highlights
Improving New Zealand’s poor workplace safety record has become a high priority following high profile workplace fatal incidents in 2010 and 2014
We propose to use surnames and first names for matching based on results from previous Work-related fatal injury study (WRFIS)-2 data matching and previous published studies that demonstrate links between hospital and police road crash records without name returned 50% linkage, whereas names resulted in 90% linkage (Feyer et al 2001b)
Physical case files will be obtained from the Coronial Services of New Zealand (NZ), Wellington, while electronic files will be obtained from the National Coronial Information System (NCIS), Australia
Summary
Improving New Zealand’s poor workplace safety record has become a high priority following high profile workplace fatal incidents in 2010 and 2014. Existing routine official data are unable to reliably inform occupational safety policy and action in New Zealand. This case review study will examine work-related fatal injury (WRFI) to: i) determine their burden, rates and distribution; ii) identify high-risk groups, causes and circumstances; iii) analyse secular trends, and iv) examine the impact of historic occupational safety legislative reform. The reasons for NZ’s poor performance, including the performance of the occupational safety regulatory environment, are highly debated and inadequately informed due to a lack of high quality work-related fatality data (Independent Taskforce on Workforce Health and Safety 2013). The recent 2013 Independent Taskforce on Workplace Safety was, “strongly of the view that all workplace injuries are preventable, any death is unacceptable” (Independent Taskforce on Workforce Health and Safety 2013)
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