In this blog, we discuss Work Health and Safety incident notification under the Australian, and specifically, Queensland, Works Health and Safety legislation. We discuss:
- What incidents need to be notified
- How to notify an incident
- What to expect after notifying.
Check out the video here as well as the transcript below.
Today we’re going to be talking about incident notification under the work health and safety, and electrical safety legislation. My name’s Michael Terry I’m from moment safety and ergonomics and this is the five minute safety series.
Incident Notification
So generally speaking, what we’re talking about when we’re talking about incident notification is the duty of a business or undertaking to notify the work health and safety regulator when an incident occurs in their workplace, and it’s a certain type of incident that must be notified. It’s important to realize as well that there are actual penalties for non-notification. So, if for example something happened and work health and safety Queensland or your (local regulator in Australia) otherwise found out about this (which they can do from various means) there is potential fines for that business as well.
WHS Notifiable Incidents
So, let’s jump in and look at what types of incidents must be notified, and we can look at this from the point of view of looking at it under the work health and safety legislation in which case we must notify fatalities, serious injuries and illness illnesses, and dangerous events. The electrical safety legislation under Queensland is very similar, and this is going to be any what we call a serious electrical incident or a dangerous electrical event. So, these are very similar categories actually to the work health and safety legislation, but they are separate because they are they do come under separate legislation. Jumping in and look at those specifically so we know what they actually refer to, and I’ve given you a link here. There’s much more detail on the actual regulators web page so I’d encourage you to refer to that.
So serious injury or illness is really five key categories.
1. The first one is any injury or illness that requires a person to have some immediate treatment as an inpatient in a hospital. So, inpatient meaning they’re not just going to emergency they’re actually admitted into the hospital.
2. It might also be immediate treatment for one of these things such as amputations, head injuries, serious burns. And again, each of those particular categories there have their own set of specific definitions which is a bit too much to display on these slides but you can definitely find those on your regulator’s web page.
3. The third category is any medical treatment within 48 hours from exposure to a substance. This is doesn’t have to be admitted to a hospital, but it might be a doctor or someone like that where you receive some sort of illness from an exposure to a substance.
4. The fourth one is any infection to which your work was a significant contributing factor and again they give you a nice list of what those infections are.
5. And the last one is an occupational zoonosis which is some sort of infection or disease contracted by (from) an animal whereby that source of work was a contributor towards that. So vets, farms, those sorts of places and that’s going to be very relevant too.
A dangerous incident is any time where a serious incident could have happened but through maybe luck or chance it actually did not. So again we have a very specific list of events which are classified as dangerous incidents under the work health and safety legislation. I won’t read through them all but that’s a little bit of a list that you can look at on screen.
Electrical Notifiable Incidents
Serious electrical incidents fall under the same sorts of categories as the serious injuries or illnesses but they obviously pertain specifically to electricity. So we’re talking about things like shock or injury, if it’s treated by a doctor or even if someone receives a shock or injury from high voltage power it’s notifiable even if they weren’t treated by a doctor.
And dangerous electrical events refer to pretty much unsafe electrical practice. So unsafe electrical work, property damaged, unlicensed work, those sorts of things are the types of things that fall into the category of dangerous electrical events.
Other details:
So, all of these are the main things that need to be notified, so I guess the next question is what do you need to do if one of those actually occurs in your workplace? And so yes you must notify the regulator and you must notify them as soon as you become aware you being the business or undertaking and you must notify the regulator by an approved mean. So, this means generally means either a telephone with a follow-up notification or using the online notification. So, you’ll choose the appropriate means depending on the nature of the incident. Other points to make that you need to be aware of is that you need to keep these records of notifications for at least five years. That’s legally required of you, and the business also has a duty to preserve the incident site. So not to disturb and just put things back to business as normal until given approval by a regulator inspector police or if there’s some sort of need to make the situation safe or remove a person – something like that. But if those things don’t apply then we have a duty to ensure that the work site or the site is preserved, really for investigation
So, looking at the screen here we can see this is Queensland’s work health and safety web page (worksafe.qld.gov.au) and it’s right on the very front page there’s a notify and incident option there, and it’ll take you to this form here. Now every other regulator would have something similar in in their jurisdiction.
What happens now?
So, the last sort of i guess thing to consider is what happens after you make this notification and that’s really going to depend on the severity of the incident. Maybe the history of your business if you’ve notified a lot, they’re going to be more likely to investigate, whereas if this is your first one and you’ve got an otherwise good history and the incident’s not too severe perhaps a phone call might be appropriate. But certainly you should be preparing yourself for a visit from an inspector and the potential for an investigation from them. After they’ve done their investigation, and obviously we can do more we’ll give you some more video information on these in later videos, but the things that can happen are things like improvement notices, prohibition notices, fines, and if it’s severe the regulator may even start building a case for prosecution against the business.
So, there we go guys that was incident notification in as short a time as I could do it. Hopefully we got all the information over to you there. If you do require further information I would strongly encourage you to jump on your regulator’s website and we’ll give you some links to those at the end of this video. Thanks for listening.