In New Zealand, we’re unfortunately too familiar with the serious consequences of poorly-conducted health and safety practices. Every year, it is estimated that nationwide between 50 and 100 people die in workplace accidents - we say that’s 50-100 people too many.
Injuries and incidents can and do happen. Although some work environments are more high-risk than others, accidents do not discriminate. People are harmed doing all kinds of work, and risks and hazards exist in all types of workplaces.
Preventing and reducing incident numbers across an organisation is a fundamental health and safety objective. What is often overlooked, however, is that health and safety needs to be embedded in the company culture. The best way to create a safety culture is for organisations to examine critical lessons that can be learned from common incidents. Indeed, large incidents are often a product of failure to onboard key lessons from previous, smaller incidents.
In this article, we review common workplace incidents – and what organisations can do to learn from them and enable better health and safety outcomes.