The Role of Design Issues in Work-Related Fatal Injury in Australia

This assessed the contribution of design issues to the occurrence of fatal work-related injuries in Australia.

Work-related injury data was sourced from a national coroners’ information system. 210 fatalities over the 2000-02 period were included. A limitation of this dataset is that it was not produced for the purposes of incident prevention (nor did it focus on design).

Design was implicated if “any aspect of the construction of equipment, plant, tools, or structure involved in the incident made a meaningful contribution to the occurrence of the injury-causing incident” (p210).

Results

37% of the 210 assessed workplace fatalities definitely or probably had design-related issues involved. In another 14% of cases, circumstances were suggestive of design issues being involved.

Design-related issues were more prevalent for machinery and fixed plant, mobile plant, and transport. Design-related prevalence varied considerably between different specific agency types (see the image at the end of the summary).

The most common design-related fatality scenarios involved issues with rollover structures, seat belts, inadequate guarding, lack of RCDs, inadequate fall protection, failed hydraulic systems in vehicles and mobile equipment and more.

In one example, they cite many instances of workers being hit by forklifts, where line of sight, warning lights, alarms or environmental lighting were found to be important. In this case, all of these can be considered design problems.

Guarding was also a major design issue, found to be often absent or inadequate for the task. Three fatal injuries involved clothing being caught in an auger, and others with the contact with moving parts.

The highest numbers of workplace fatalities were in agriculture, construction, transport, manufacturing and mining – where design issues were definitely or probably involved in around 40% or more of fatalities.

Authors note that in some cases, design issues were clearly visible, but in other cases it was difficult to make an association. One issue was that these reports didn’t particularly consider design; another is that only the apparent primary design issue was identified and not other related design issues. Thus, design contributions are probably under-estimated.

Finally, although authors note that they couldn’t evaluate the tractability, cost or risk trade-offs relevant to preventing the accidents, in a majority of cases there appeared to be “obvious design issues that appeared to have straight-forward design solutions” (p213).

Some of the fatality agency groups related to design are shown below: