Citation

Altree-Williams S. J. Health Saf. Res. Pract. 2012; 4(1): 1-9.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2012, Safety Institute of Australia, Publisher LexisNexis Media)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

A numerical measure of case severity is important because it allows quantitative evaluation of the second independent characteristic (i.e. in addition to case rate) of OHS observed risk for a work environment. The nature of the case severity characteristic in OHS is considered and the observed numerical data on case severity for serious OHS cases in the Australian national OHS outcome data are evaluated. The case distribution by Safe Work Australia severity groupings is documented and the 'mean time lost' parameter is calculated for Mechanism of Incident group and for industry.

Mean time lost is sensitive to variation in high value outliers in the case severity distribution and can be readily calculated for the local workplace, for intra-industry aggregations made up of independent businesses, and nationally.

Mean time lost data for the National OHS Strategy priority industries (together with mining and education) are provided. The results show that all these industries have achieved a substantial reduction in their case severity for serious OHS injury cases by the middling-period of the National OHS Strategy 2002-2012, with parity-attenuated case severity in Australia reducing by 11% over the five year duration to 2006-07.

Language: en