Almost 150 Australian workers lost their lives last year whilst more than 100,000 suffered serious injuries throughout the previous financial year, data from Australia’s safety regulator has shown.

In its latest report, Safe Work Australia has provided a statistical overview of fatalities, injuries and diseases suffered at workplaces throughout Australia.

It found that during 2017/18 – the most recent year for which data is available – workers around Australia lodged 107,335 workers compensation claims for serious injury.

This represented 5.5 serious claims for every million hours worked.

During calendar 2018, meanwhile, 144 workers lost their lives.

Whilst sobering, the data reveals that Australia has made improvements in safety over time.

Compared with its 3.1 per 100,000 worker peak in calendar 2007, the annual rate of fatalities has fallen by around two thirds.

The rate of serious injuries, meanwhile, has almost halved since it sat at almost 10 per million hours worked at the turn of the century.

Safe Work Australia chief executive officer Michelle Baxter welcomed the improvement but cautioned that more needed to be done.

“While these trends are encouraging, they are not a cause for celebration,” Baxter said.

“Every work-related fatality is a tragedy, and there’s a lot more work to be done.”

According to the data:

• Blue collar or labour intensive occupations are disproportionately represented in injury and fatality related data. Between them, machinery operators and drivers, labourers and technicians accounted for more than four in five fatalities in calendar 2018 and just over half (55 percent) of all injuries in 2017/18. With a fatality rate of 6.2 per 100,000 workers, machinery operators and drivers are more than twice as likely to die at work compared with labourers and are more than six, twenty and sixty times more likely to die at work compared with managers, professionals and clerical workers.
• The highest risk industries are agriculture, transport/warehousing, mining, construction and manufacturing – though mining has a relatively low rate of serious injury despite having a high fatality rate. Fatality rates per 100,000 workers in each of these sectors stand at 11.2, 5.9, 3.7, 2.0 and 1.4 respectively. Serious injury rates per million hours worked stand at 8.6 in agriculture, 8.1 in manufacturing, 7.7 in transport, 7.5 in construction and a much better 4.3 in mining.
• Men are more likely to die or be injured at work compared with women. All up, men suffer a fatality rate of 2.0 per 100,000 workers compared with 0.1 per 100,000 workers for women. Men also suffer 6.0 serious injuries per 100,000 hours worked compared with 4.8 serious injuries per 100,000 hours worked for women.
• Older workers are at greater risk compared with younger workers. Workers aged between 55 and 64 and 65 and over are twice and four times more likely to die on the job compared with those aged between 25 and 34. The statistically highest injury rates occur amongst age brackets which fall between 60 and 64 followed by those between 55 and 59, and between 50 and 54.
• Vehicle collisions were the most common mechanism by which fatal work injuries occurred (31 percent) followed by being hit by moving objects (17 percent) and falls from height (13 percent). By contrast, body stressing (36 percent); slips, trips and falls (23 percent) and being hit by moving objects (16 percent) were the most common means by which serious injury occurred.
• The most common forms of serious injuries are traumatic joint/ligament and muscle/tendon injury; wounds, lacerations, amputations and internal organ damage; musculoskeletal and connective tissue diseases and fractures. Together, these accounted for 80 percent of all serious injuries for which workers compensation claims were lodged.
• Arms/upper limbs, legs/lower limbs and back were the most common body location for serious injury or disease. Together, these body locations accounted for two-thirds of all serious injuries for which claims were lodged.
• In 2012/13 – the most recent year for which data are available, the overall cost associated with work-related injuries amounted to $$61.8 billion – up from $34.3 billion in 2000-01. Of this, Safe Work says more than three quarters (77 percent) was borne by workers themselves whilst 18 percent was borne by the community and only five percent was borne by employers. The Safe Work report does not say how much workers were able to claim through workers compensation or how much employers paid into workers compensation schemes.