About 38,000 South Australians are injured, made sick, or die due to their work every year. A workplace injury affects a person in many ways beyond the physical pain of the illness.
Costs to the worker
Injured workers often worry how the injury will impact their livelihood and their family. A person can suffer a loss of confidence, which sometimes becomes worse the longer they are away from work.
Costs to business
Workcover estimates that for every dollar an employer pays on a workplace injury claim there is an indirect cost to the business that can be up to nine times extra.
Aside from the personal trauma of the injured person, after an injury co-workers and the business itself can be affected by the following factors:
- Loss of productivity and staff morale following an accident
- Meeting the costs of hiring someone to fill in while the worker recovers
- Time lost spent investigating how the incident occured
- First aid costs
- Increased administration time associated with the injury
- An increase in the employer's levy rate plus possible fines
While prevention is obviously the most desirable course for workers and employers, in the event that an injury occurs, reporting the incident within 24 hours increase the speed of recovery and can reduce overall claims costs by up to 45 per cent.