By Vanessa Chircop
HOBSONS Bay has had the second highest number of WorkSafe claims in the West since 2006 – coming a close second to Wyndham.
A week after Victorian workplaces were confirmed as Australia’s safest, WorkSafe has launched a campaign urging safety improvements before an inspector visits.
The new campaign, ‘Any Day Now’ went to air last night and comes on the heels of the Federal Government’s annual benchmarking report which confirms Victoria as having the lowest number of injuries per-thousand workers of any state or territory.
Despite this, there were 4681 standardised claims reported in Hobsons Bay from July 2006 to June 201.
And despite coming second, Hobsons Bay boasted the highest payments, with more than $101 million being paid to workers since 2006.
In Wyndham there were 4911 WorkSafe claims paying out more than $96 million in worker’s compensation.
The figures indicate only those whose injuries caused them to be off work 10 days or more and those who had treatment costing more than $580.
They don’t include self-employed people unless identified as employees of a company.
As a whole there were 17,720 claims in the West with more than $366 million in worker’s compensation paid out.
In 2010-11 inspectors visited 1546 workplaces across Victoria issuing 2,118 safety improvement notices and 24 prohibition notices where there was an immediate risk to safety or health.
In 171 cases safety issues were fixed on-the-spot.
Commonly-found issues include dangerous manual handling including non-use of suitable lifting devices, damaged storage racking, unguarded machines, unsafe scaffolding, inappropriate storage of dangerous goods, inadequate return-to-work plans for injured workers and poor forklift traffic management.
