Australia losing more than 41,000 work years from workplace injuries, illness

Australia is losing a total of 41,194 work years annually due to work-related injuries, disease, and mental health conditions, according to a new metric.

The metric, developed by a team from Monash University, based its findings on data between July 2012 and June 2017.

"Annually, compensable occupational injury and disease in Australia results in a substantial burden of lost working time, equivalent to over 41,000 lost jobs," said Professor Alex Collie from Monash University's School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, in a statement.

According to the metric, traumatic injury resulted in 16,494 (40%) working years lost (WYL) per annum.

This is followed by musculoskeletal disorders with 8,547 WFL (20.7%), and then by mental health conditions with 5,361 WYL (13%). 

By gender, male workers incurred 25,367 WYL (61.6%) and female workers accounted for 15,827 WYL (38.4%).

"The distribution of burden reflects the higher labour force participation of males, slower rehabilitation in older workers, and the relative impact of common occupational injuries and diseases," Collie said.

"Effective occupational health surveillance, policy development, and resource allocation will benefit from population-based monitoring of working time loss."

New metric on workplace injuries

The findings are based on a new metric developed by a team from Monash University, which measures for the first time ever the national impact of lost working time due to work-based injury, illness, and disease that qualify for compensation.

"Normally we track injury and disease at work by counting the number of people making compensation claims or the amount of time they spend off work," Collie said.

"This new measure combines those two concepts and presents it as something more meaningful, which can be summarised as the number of people off work for a full year."

According to Collie, the impact of some types of injury and disease are more accurately represented in the new metric.

"For instance, mental health conditions have a much higher percentage of working years lost than of workers' compensation claims," he explained. "This is because we take the long time off work for each mental health claim into account, whereas simply counting claims does not do this."

The findings of the new metric are now published in the Medical Journal of Australia, according to Monash University.