Your Workplace Injuries Prevention and Management Guide
There are more than 550,000 people who suffer workplace injuries in Australia each year.
The good news is that number is down from almost 700,000 people about a decade ago. But the bad news is that there are still a lot of people getting hurt at work each year across the country.
Because of this, you should keep workplace injuries prevention at the forefront of your mind while you’re running a company. Your employees will be able to avoid accidents in the workplace when you take the right approach to prevent them.
Since it’ll be almost impossible to prevent workplace injuries altogether, you should also make it a point to manage the cases of those injured at work more effectively. It’ll help limit the number of days that your employees have to miss due to workplace injuries.
Check out our workplace injuries prevention and management guide below.
Figure Out Which Workplace Injuries Might Impact Your Employees
To be clear, your employees can suffer almost any injuries while they’re at work. All it takes is one slip and fall accident for one of your employees to break a bone, tear an ACL, or sustain any number of other injuries.
But you should take a look at the tasks your employees are asked to do every day and try to figure out which workplace injuries they might be most likely to suffer. It’ll give you some important insight into what you’ll need to do to help them steer clear of those specific injuries.
Some of the most common workplace injuries include:
- Back strains
- Concussions
- Broken bones
- Burns
- Cuts and scrapes
Work on identifying which of these injuries might affect your employees the most. You should be able to work on a plan of action for workplace injuries prevention from there.
Teach Your Employees How to Avoid Accidents in the Workplace
Once you know which workplace injuries your employees will be most likely to suffer from, you can start teaching them how to avoid them. You should start things off by running through the list of common workplace injuries that you’ve come up with.
Then, you should talk to your employees about how they can avoid accidents in the workplace. They can usually do it by:
- Wearing the proper protective equipment while they’re on the job
- Cleaning up after themselves and leaving floors and other surfaces spotless
- Trying not to pick up things that are too heavy without using the necessary equipment
You can help to prevent workplace injuries by providing your employees with lots of different tips and tricks on workplace safety.
Hang Up Signs to Remind Your Employees About Staying Safe at Work
In addition to giving your employees the tools that they’ll need to stay safe at work, you should emphasize your company’s safety policies with the proper signage. You should post signs all over the place with safety regulations on them.
You should also go out of your way to keep these signs updated. Even if you aren’t adding any new information to a sign, taking an old sign down and putting a new one in its place will catch the attention of your employees.
Ask Your Employees to Report Workplace Injuries Immediately
As we alluded to earlier, you can take workplace injuries prevention as seriously as you want. But there is still a good chance that your employees will suffer workplace injuries every so often.
If and when they do, you should have a system in place that makes it easy for them to report these injuries. You should take every injury that is reported and investigate it to find out what happened.
By doing this, you can find out who was at fault for an employee’s injury. You can also take what you’re able to learn and use it to implement new safety procedures.
You might be tempted to tell your employees not to report too many injuries since they’re going to reflect poorly on your company at times. But you should resist the urge to do this and make sure that your employees are reporting injuries in the right way.
Stop Your Employees From Continuing to Work While Injured
If one of your employees is ever injured, they might push for you to allow them to get back to work ASAP. But the last thing that you want to do is send someone back to work when they’re hurt and have them get hurt even worse.
For this reason, you should always stop your employees from going back to work when they’re injured. You should also make them go and get cleared by a doctor before you allow them to begin working again.
Carry a Workers’ Compensation Insurance Policy to Protect Yourself
To run a legitimate business, you’ll need to get your hands on a workers’ compensation insurance policy. Businesses are required to have this type of insurance because of all the workplace injuries that people sustain each year.
You should be able to find a policy through WorkSafe Queensland. You should also ask yourself the question, “Do I need Workcover QLD and ReturnToWork SA integration for filing claims?”
If you think you do, you can obtain case management software that will make it easy to manage workplace injuries and handle claims related to them.
Workplace Injuries Prevention and Management Is Important
Workplace injuries come with the territory when you own a business. Your employees are always going to be at risk for injuries while they’re working on your behalf.
You should take what you’ve learned here about workplace injuries prevention and management and apply it to your business. By scaling back on the number of workplace injuries that you have to deal with, you can save yourself time and money and keep your employees happy in the long run.
Read through some of the other articles posted on our blog to find more tips that will help you run your business.
