A recent study from Monash University has revealed the staggering economic impact of workplace injuries and illnesses in Australia, from the perspective of time lost from work.
The landmark study, led by Associate Professor Alex Collie from the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, found that Australia loses 41,194 work years annually due to work-related injury, disease and mental health conditions.
The research analysed workers’ compensation claims data to quantify the total work years lost (WYL) due to workplace injury and illness. It found that workplace injuries and disease resulted in substantial economic impact, with injured workers typically requiring extended recovery periods, leading to significant productivity losses.
The study is the first to quantify the national burden of working time lost to compensable occupational injury and disease. The study also studied how this loss was distributed across age, sex, injury and disease.
Professor Collie explains the concept as a more accurate representation of some workplace injuries and diseases.
“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,” he 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.”
Professor Collie added the WYL metric provided a different way to view the challenges presented by workplace injury.
“For instance, mental health conditions have a much higher percentage of working years lost than of workers’ compensation claims. 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 national study covered people with accepted workers’ compensation claims and receiving wage replacement benefits for time off work, lodged between July 2012 and June 2017.