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Safe Work Australia - Quarterly Newsletter August 2023

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Friday 25 August 2023

August 2023

Welcome to the Safe Work Australia Quarterly Update

In the August edition of the Safe Work Australia quarterly newsletter we’re focusing on our data and how it provides key national insights that can help drive improvements in work health and safety and workers’ compensation.

 

 

Michelle Baxter
CEO Safe Work Australia

Our Data. Your Stories.

Welcome to the latest edition of our Safe Work Australia quarterly newsletter. In this instalment, it’s all about data. You’ll get an insight into our data, how we’re innovating to improve our national data collection and delivery, and how this contributes to improving work health and safety (WHS) and workers’ compensation arrangements to make work safer for everyone.

Developing an evidence base to inform WHS and workers’ compensation policy and practice is one of Safe Work Australia’s key functions.  We have been progressing a data improvement project since late 2020 to make our data more useful and accessible and to improve our data communication.  

 

Recently we’ve reached some important milestones on our data improvement journey. Behind the scenes, we’ve transitioned our data to a new operating environment. This means we can make it publicly available more efficiently and effectively, and enable more insights into key WHS issues and trends to be explored.

This month we officially launched our new interactive data website, a significant achievement in making our national data easier to access and explore. Through the website, we are releasing more data than ever before, driving new insights. I really encourage you to go to the website and take a look - Our Data. Your Stories. | dataswa (safeworkaustralia.gov.au)

 

 

Read more

 

 

Illustrated image of a female and male food delivery rider

Putting together the data puzzle

One of Safe Work Australia’s key roles is to collect, analyse, publish and promote national WHS and workers’ compensation data. Our data builds the national evidence base to help inform policy and practice to make our workplaces safer.

 

 

 

 

Read more

 

 

Female wearing scrubs and stethoscope smiling

Case study: How Safe Work Australia data informs academic research

Professor Alex Collie leads the Healthy Working Lives Research Unit in the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Monash University. He is also the President of the Scientific Committee on Work Disability Prevention for the International Commission on Occupational Health. 
Professor Collie talks about how Safe Work Australia data informs his work and why the data is so important.

 

 

 

Read the case study

 

 

Using data to contribute to policy development
 

Recently we contributed to the Draft National Strategy for the Care and Support Economy, which sets a roadmap of actions to achieve a sustainable and productive care and support economy.


READ MORE

 

Data highlight – Older workers’ safety in the workplace 

This analysis used data from the Work-related Injury Survey, the National Dataset for Compensation-based Statistics, the Traumatic Injury Fatalities database and the National Return to Work Survey.

READ MORE

 

 

Female and male in work clothes looking at papers

Using data to improve WHS outcomes for apprentices and trainees

Using data from the National Data Set for Compensation-based Statistics (NDS), we prepared a new report on WHS outcomes for apprentices and trainees under 30 in the Construction and Manufacturing industries. 

 

 

 

Read more

 

 

Female wearing scrubs and stethoscope smiling

Case study: How data can be a powerful tool for WHS professionals

Read about how Sarah, a WHS manager, used the Safe Work Australia data website to improve safety in her workplace by assisting her to identify hazards, assess WHS risks in the workplace, and put in control measures. 

 

 

 

Read the case study

 

 

 

 

Why we're here

A core function of our work is developing and maintaining an evidence base to inform WHS and workers' compensation policy and practice

 

 

$28.6 billion

The value to the Australian economy each year from reducing work-related injuries and illnesses

130,195

Serious workers’ compensation 
claims in 2020-21p

95 killed

The preliminary number of 
Australians killed at work in 2023

 

 

 

 

 

See more data