Status of OHS in Australian construction

The Office of the Federal Safety Commissioner recently released its ‘Biannual Report July to December 2009’, an analysis on OHS data collected from reports from accredited construction companies for the second half of the 2009 calendar year.

The Federal Safety Commissioner’s (OFSC) ‘Biannual Report July to December 2009’ report shows the Australian Government Building and Construction OHS Accreditation Scheme is growing rapidly, with the number of companies accredited under it increasing by 35% in the 12 months since the December 2008 reporting period. Over that period, the number of projects reported under the scheme increased by 78%.

The performance of accredited companies continues to be encouraging, with the median Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate (LTIFR) for projects falling to its lowest recorded level of 2.51 LTIs per million hours worked.

From mid-2009, accredited contractors were asked to report head-contractor employees [overall] and the number of hours worked on both scheme and non-scheme projects over $3 million. This data provides consistently accurate LTIFR and Medically Treated Injury Frequency Rate (MTIFR) estimates.

Fatalities

Details of fatalities in scheme and non-scheme projects are outlined in Table 1. The incident rates for accredited companies are overstated, as hours for projects less than $3 million aren’t included, even though all fatalities for these companies are included. Even with this overstatement, frequency rates for accredited companies for the 2009 period were well below the frequency rate for the construction industry overall.

Table 1: Fatalities.

Table 2: LTIFR.

Table 3: MTIFR.

Table 4: Workers compensation premiums.

Table 5: Positive performance indicators.

There were no scheme-project fatalities and one non-scheme-project fatality (excluding heart attacks) in the latest reporting period. Non-scheme project fatalities (excluding heart attacks) decreased by 75% between the 2008 and 2009 reporting periods.

LTIFR

While the mean LTIFR for scheme projects is an improvement on the previous period, it has increased compared with the corresponding period for the previous year. Mean LTIFR for non-scheme data remain stable.

The median LTIFR for scheme projects has remained at zero for all biannual reporting periods, while the median LTIFR for non-scheme projects decreased in the December 2009 period to an all-time low of 2.51.

As both scheme and non-scheme projects have a few very high LTIFR values, the Winsorized mean was also calculated as it is regarded as a more robust estimator of the central tendency because it is less sensitive to outliers.

For the 2009 period, around 65% of all accredited contractors undertaking scheme projects reported no LTIs, while around 81% were below the mean LTIFR for scheme projects.

For the same period, around 44% of all accredited contractors undertaking non-scheme projects reported no LTIs, while around 69% were below the mean LTIFR for non-scheme projects.

MTIFR

Between the 2008 and 2009 periods, the scheme median MTIFR increased significantly; however, the mean has remained relatively constant. Both scheme and non-scheme projects had extreme MTIFR values, which had an impact on all MTIFR averages.

For the 2009 period, around 39% of all accredited contractors undertaking scheme projects reported no MTIs, while 67% were below the mean MTIFR for scheme projects. For the same period, 24% of all accredited contractors undertaking non-scheme projects reported no MTIs, while 72% were below the mean MTIFR for non-scheme projects.

Injury profile

Accredited contractors are required to report LTIs based on the mechanism of incident classification groups contained in Safe Work Australia’s ‘Type of Occurrence Classification System, Version 3.1’. This mechanism is intended to identify the overall action, exposure or event that best describes the circumstances that resulted in the most serious injury or disease. Accredited contractors report at the major-group classification level.

For the 2009 reporting period, 621 incidents were reported by 88 accredited contractors compared to 800 incidents by 86 accredited contractors in the 2008 period, a 22% decrease.

The top five mechanism of incident groups accounted for 95.8% of all incidents for the 2009 reporting period compared to 95.6% for the 2008 period. Group 2 - being hit by moving objects - had the largest variation, with an increase of 5.2 percentage points compared to the 2008 period.

High-risk construction work

Accredited contractors are required to report if they performed any ‘high-risk construction work’ as described in the National Standard For Construction Work [NOHSC:1016 (2005)] and indicate whether any such work resulted in an injury or near-miss event that required the accredited contractor to notify the relevant OHS authority (under the OHS legislation covering notifiable incidents) in the jurisdiction in which the project was undertaken.

The objective of this standard is to protect persons from hazards associated with construction work. It assigns responsibilities to individuals to identify these hazards and eliminate them or, where this isn’t reasonably practicable, minimise the risks they pose. There are 19 hazards that have been identified as high-risk construction work. There were 198 notifiable incidents reported by 38 accredited contractors to the relevant jurisdiction OHS authority for the 2009 period, compared to 167 notifiable incidents by 45 accredited contractors in the 2008 period. It should be noted that, with the number of accredited contractors reporting increasing from 122 in the 2008 period to 165 in the 2009 period, the number of notifiable incidents has actually fallen in relative terms.

The top-three notifiable incidents accounted for 73.2% of all incidents for the 2009 period compared to 76% in the 2008 period. Work on construction sites where there is any movement of powered mobile plant was the most common incident (30.8%), an increase of 3.9 percentage points; followed by construction work on or near energised electrical installations and services (29.8%), a decrease of 2.5 percentage points.

Workers compensation

Between the 2008 and 2009 reporting periods, the mean premium rates for accredited contractors increased for New South Wales, Northern Territory and Tasmania; and decreased for the Australian Capital Territory, Queensland, South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia.

For comparative purposes, the latest available premium rates for house construction and non-residential construction across most jurisdictions have been included. At 30 June 2009, the mean premium rates for accredited contractors were below those for the non-residential construction industry, except South Australia and Western Australia; and also below those for house construction except South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia.

Positive performance indicators

Positive performance indicators (PPIs) are measures of actions or initiatives introduced to prevent workplace injury and disease. Accredited contractors report details of PPIs, as well as details of any peer or industry recognition for OHS performance, and details of key OHS initiatives implemented during the reporting period.

Examples of these indicators, recognition and initiatives for the June 2009 reporting period are shown in Table 5. Results for the 2009 period were similar to the last biannual period for most PPIs. Toolbox meetings dropped 8 percentage points and OHS training to Certificate III or better by employees increased 4 percentage points.