The evidence base for WHS priority setting in a changing work landscape: an appraisal of sources and opportunities for enhancement

ABSTRACT

This review paper contributes to literature on the changing nature of work and its implications for regulating work health and safety (WHS). The paper aims to examine how Australian WHS agencies can enhance their evidence base for setting priorities, in the context of trends in business size and structure, industry and work, unionisation, work arrangements and worker attributes. The paper maps key trends and incorporates these in a conceptual framework for appraising data and information sources for priority setting, as identified through searches of literature databases and websites of WHS agencies. With reference to this conceptual framework, the paper examines a range of regulator, compensation, coronial, health and labour datasets. Principal findings are: the greater strength of information about traumatic deaths, injuries and their causes compared with information about slower onset diseases and conditions; the limited basis for differentiating business WHS performance and worker experiences by key business and workforce trends; under-representation of vulnerable workers’ experiences; and the retrospective focus of many sources. The paper concludes that to enhance their evidence base, WHS agencies will need to build analytical expertise and/or links with research bodies and carefully select, extend and combine sources.

KEYWORDS:

• Changing work
• health and safety
• evidence
• data
• priority
• target

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest is reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Sole traders or partnerships without employees (Gilfillan 2018a).

2. Sole traders who are dependent on those they work but are engaged as independent contractors.

3. Technologies that use artificial ‘neural networks’ to learn to recognise patterns in digital representations of data (Buchanan et al. 2018, 9).

4. Requiring immediate treatment as an in-patient in a hospital or for specific types of injuries, or medical treatment within 48 hours of exposure to a substance.

5. Serious risks emanating from immediate or imminent exposure to specific, prescribed risks.

6. Two Commonwealth, six state and two territory.

7. Injuries are compensated if work is a significant contributing factor, but diseases are only compensated if work is the main, major, most significant contributing factor, or the real proximate or effective cause (SWA 2018b, 27–28).

8.. Asbestos, silica, hard metal and coal dust-related diseases, and others prescribed in the Workers’ Compensation (Dust Diseases) Act 1942, schedule 1.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Bluff

Elizabeth Bluff, BSc (Hons), MAppSc (OHS), PhD is Visiting Fellow at the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) at the Australian National University (ANU). Her work in the field of work health and safety spans regulatory research, postgraduate education, and government policy and standards development. As well as peer reviewed articles relating to WHS regulation and policy, her books are Safe Design and Construction of Machinery, Regulation Practice and Performance, Work Health and Safety Law and Policy (with R Johnstone and A Clayton), and OHS Regulation for a Changing World of Work (with N Gunningham and R Johnstone).

Valerie O'Keeffe

Valerie O'Keeffe DipAppSc, GradDip(SocSc & OH), MErg, PhD is Senior Research Fellow in Human Factors at the Australian Industrial Transformation Institute at Flinders University. She currently specialises in work health and safety, and ergonomics and human factors in the application of advanced technologies, and has worked in policy development, research, compliance and enforcement with WHS agencies at state and national levels, and as a specialist WHS quality management systems auditor. Her publications span psychosocial and musculoskeletal risks at work, and safety risk assessment, communication and sense making.