Marcus Cattani

Injury prevention in agriculture

Occupational health and safety is concerned with preventing workplace injuries. There are processes available to guide organsations in how to prevent people from being hurt at work. Organisations in high risk sectors such as mining have implemented these processes over the last 20 years and have improved their performance considerably. These processes usually start with gaining leadership committment to preventing harm, then a risk based approach to focus on equipment, tasks and processes which have the potential for harm. Whilst it may take several years to improve performance, the time, financial and effort invested stops people being hurt or killed at work, which is a significant advantage to employers and employees.

Safe Work Australia is the Australian federal government agency which analyses worker compensation and other data to determine the national priorities for workplace performance improvement (ref: (Interactive Data | dataswa) . Several organisational types (i.e. small and medium sized enterprises) and injustry sectors (i.e. agriculture) have been at the top or near the top of the injury ranking for over 5 years. The national work health and safety strategy responds to this data and information with a vision, goal, enablers, targets and actions (ref: australian_whs_strategy_2022-32_june2024.pdf).

In 2023 an independent report communicated the results of an inquiry into the West Australian agriculture industry as there had been 12 deaths in 12 months in 2022. The report is a useful foundation for this research project (ref: Inquiry into the agricultural industry in Western Australia – Report to the WorkSafe Commissioner). There are several important observations made in the report, including:

• "Many farmers are very conscious of the risks inherent in their operations and actively work towards overcoming those risks and keeping their workers safe. Others treat risks and incidents, injuries and deaths that arise as being inevitable".
• "This Inquiry found many examples of polar-opposite views:
  • 1. of industry leaders who view the need to take the time and effort to keep their people safe as a nuisance, an impediment to productivity and a reduction in profitability; and
  • 2. of industry leaders and farmers consistently working towards education and training and better methods of keeping their people safe"

Since injury and fatality prevention starts with gaining leadership committment, it appears that the first part of a project to improve performance is to address the issues which led to the Inquirer making these remarks. Once farmers are committed to preventing harm, then a series of processes to address unacceptable risk are required.

The project to improve work health and safety in agriculture comprises several elements suitable for PhD research:

1. Leadership committment: Developing leadership information and training
2. Risk management: Engaging with farmers to develop or convert from elsewhere injury prevention proceeses
3. Evaluation of a systems approach: How to apply the learnings from agriculture to others sectors