Safe Work Australia released the fifth edition of the Occupational Disease Indicators recently, reporting on the latest trends of the diseases related to specific occupations.
In May 2002, the Workplace Relations Ministers’ Council released the National OHS Strategy 2002-2012 which upon expiration was replaced by Strategy 2012-2022. The strategy 2012-2022 was developed through consultation with governments, industry, unions and the public. Occupational Disease Indicators (ODI) reports support one of the major objectives of the Strategy, “to prevent occupational disease more effectively”, and are released every two years since 2006.
Occupational disease is defined as “Diseases that are caused or aggravated by exposure to workplace hazards”. The ODI report 2014 analyzes the workers’ compensation claims data from the National Data Set for Compensation-based Statistics (NDS) and provides trends in following 8 major occupational diseases:
Musculoskeletal disorders
Infectious and parasitic diseases
Respiratory diseases
Contact dermatitis
Cardiovascular diseases
Occupational cancers
Mental disorders
Noise-induced hearing loss
According to the report, the rates of workers’ compensation claims for the latter 3 occupational diseases have been stable during the investigated time span, while all 5 others have been fallen dramatically. Additionally, the report also provides characteristics of the diseases, known causes, occupations at highest risk and prevention policies. Besides NDS, 4 other sources also provide data that are used in the report, such as New South Wales Dust Disease Board (DDB) and National Notifiable Disease Surveillance System (NNDSS).
Safe Work Australia was established by the Safe Work Australia Act 2008 and has played a significant role in leading the development of policy to improve work health and safety and workers’ compensation arrangements across Australia. The biennial ODI report is an important reference when the policy development is discussed by competent authorities. By reading the report, companies will be able to understand the major occupational diseases affecting workers in their industries and take measures to minimize employee exposure to workplace hazards and prevent the occurrence of occupational diseases.
However, it’s difficult to establish definite causality between certain workplace hazards and diseases, because many occupational diseases are multi-factorial in nature, or have very long latency periods. So the compensation claims and other data adopted by the report has its limitations. Nonetheless, the report still gives a relatively comprehensive summary of the changes in incidence rates over time and reflects the future working priorities of Safe Work Australia.
The report can be downloaded here.
