Last month, Safe Work Australia announced WHS ministers have agreed to update incident reporting requirements. If any of the incidents below take place in your workplace, it will be mandatory to notify Safe Work. This is expected to be enforced in early 2025.
Revising reporting procedures
It can be challenging to determine if an incident should be reported to Safe Work. An approach to consider is ‘if an incident requires medical treatment, time off work, or leads to a formal investigation, it likely needs to be reported’. While no immediate change is required, it is important to be aware of these upcoming changes and prepare for their potential impact.
Potential implications of these changes
This gives WHS regulators visibility into psychosocial incidents in the workplace. SWA says the main aim is to address gaps in psychological harm notifications. There’s also recommendations to increase regulator power to inspect workplaces and access records such as claims data. There’s two key implications we see with these changes:
- Increased WHS regulatory oversight of HR & Safety practices (Ashurst wrote an insightful article on this)
- Increased chance of inspections from WHS regulators
This leads to an important question. What information will regulators be looking for from you if they inspect your workplace? Here is a list from King & Wood Mallesons. For our newsletter subscribers we extended an invitation to speak with Martyn Campbell. Martyn was the CEO of Safe Work SA and a former regulator himself. He conducts gap analysis’ on workplaces to prepare organisations for a regulator visit. We strongly recommend reaching out to someone with a legal, regulator or safety background to conduct a gap analysis. This is a simple and affordable starting point for getting psychosocial safety ready.
As always, we hope you find this article insightful. If you have any questions or comments, please reach out to info@skodel.com.
