It is pretty obvious that collecting information about injuries and near misses is important to ensuring the future health and safety of students and staff. However, what kind of information and how much information is required to make reasonable decisions about how to prevent injuries in the future?

Some employers have turned to the Australian Standards for guidance and have discovered Australian Standard  AS 1885.1 1990 Workplace injury and disease recording standard (the Standard).  As the Standard is subject to copyright, we are unable to provide access to it.  Despite representing the national standard of 'best practice' compliance on the topic, it is the author's view that the Standard does not provide a useful source of guidance for schools.

The Standard looks at obtaining information on the nature and extent of workplace injury and disease to allow analysis of the information so that there is efficient allocation of resources, appropriate preventative strategies are developed and data is available for monitoring the effectiveness of the control measures (note that it does not cover "near misses”).

In its statement of purpose, the Standard aims at  “..assist[ing] in the production of consistent and comparable information on work injury and disease experience at the workplace and throughout an enterprise.” The 'consistent and comparable' information is derived from the National Data set for Compensation-based Statistics (NDS) and, while it may provide someone somewhere with the basis for comparisons between states and territories, it is unlikely to help a school decide where to spend its efforts and money in identifying and controlling a hazard.  This is primarily due to the extent of detail it prescribes and the terminology it uses.

For example, section 10 of the Standard provides a list of classifications used to identify the Nature of Injury.  Some of the author's personal favourite categories are:

• 07: Traumatic amputation, including enucleation of eye (loss of eyeball);
• 11: Foreign body on external eye, in ear or nose or in respiratory,  digestive or reproductive systems (including choking);
• 15: Effects of weather, exposure, air pressure and other external causes (including bends, drowning, electrocution); and
• 71: Diseases of the respiratory system (including asthma, legionnaires disease, asbestosis, pneumoconiosis).

Grouping these very unrelated injuries together within a single category certainly won’t help you with any of your decision making. What do bends and electrocution in a school have in common? Or having a foreign body in your eye or your reproductive system? It would  be far more helpful to have categories which are tailored for the types of injury which would apply, so “asthma episode” would be very separate from  “legionnaire’s disease”.

And then there are the categories which are so specific that very few people would be able to classify them:

• 01: Fracture of vertebral column with or without mention of spinal cord lesion; and
• 13: Injuries to nerves and spinal cord without evidence of spinal bone injury.

And there is more. Under Mechanism of Injury/Disease (being the cause of the injury) there is:

• 14: Single contact with chemical or substance (excludes insect and spider bites and stings);
• 15: Long term contact with chemical or substance; and
• 16: Other contact with chemical or substance (includes insect and spider bites and stings).

For a school, bites and stings should be a category all its own. Furthermore, at the time of the notification of an illness relating to a hazardous substance, it would not necessarily be known if it was a single exposure to a chemical or multiple exposures.

The category of The Breakdown Agency/ And Agency of Injury/Disease (the object, substance or circumstance that was principally involved in, or most closely associated with, the event which lead to the injury or disease) is another area where the categories would, in general, bear little relationship to what happens in a school – for example trying to work out whether the “agency” which caused say, an asthma attack while playing sport, was “outdoor environment”(being outside?), “human agency”(running around?), or “biological agency” (freshly-mowed grass?).

When a school is considering what information needs to be collected when an injury or safety incident occurs, there are a number of practical factors that should be kept in mind.  These include:

• Most people don’t like to spend time filling in forms so injury/incident notification forms should be as simple and straightforward and short as reasonably practicable, in order not to discourage people from reporting.
• What information do you really need to know that will help you to identify the cause of the injury, illness or near miss?
• Will the information make a difference in determining control measures: who needs to know and why?
• How much does the initial notifier know when they are reporting the incident (the question about mention of spinal lesions)?
• Is the initial notifier the best person to answer that question, or is it someone who has more appropriate training eg a nurse or someone who can classify an incident in a consistent way?
• How much time the person who receives the initial report has to further classify the initial information - this is particularly important for larger schools or the head offices of systemic schools.

While the Standard has significant drawbacks in recommending a data coding system where the classifications will not be of assistance for a school, it does have some useful content. The Standard does have a systematic approach to collecting information about an injured worker which may help pinpoint areas for corrective actions. The Standard asks about the experience and training that the person had at the time of the injury, their type of employment and how long they had been working on the day the injury occurred. In practical terms, this information would be most appropriately collected in the course of the investigation into the incident.

Answering these questions would then lead to the Standard’s other value, in the systematic way it approaches deciding on potential corrective actions, with a checklist which includes, for example, changing induction or ongoing training, work environment and job design.

Australian Standards, unless they are enshrined in legislation, are not compulsory. They provide guidance and they are often used by courts as a benchmark to show that an employer has complied with their duty to take all reasonably practicable steps to eliminate or minimise a risk to health and safety.  The Standard is useful in a very limited way in identifying the type of information which should be captured to help work out what caused in incident, however its system of classifying data will not be of much help  to a school in reducing health and safety incidents. A school should have unambiguous categories which reflect the types of injuries it is most likely to have , such as sporting injuries, with “other” and “provide further details” to assist with finding solutions. As additional incidents are  reported, categories can be updated where a new type of hazard or injury is identified.