Understanding critical risks are essential for all businesses. It helps ensure businesses are focusing on managing the most important risks that are key to protecting people. These risks can have the most serious consequences, including causing loss of life, serious or permanent harm as well as the financial and productivity implications to New Zealand businesses and ACC.

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Until now there has been very limited industry-wide view on the best way to eliminate or reduce critical risks, or even what the current critical risks, and their impacts are. Many businesses in the manufacturing, retail, wholesale and road transport sectors are already taking steps to manage their critical risks, but this is all happening independently leaving some to develop their own solutions.

ShopCare sees an opportunity to add value by identifying, developing, and sharing good practices for eliminating, reducing and managing critical risks common in areas of manufacturing, retail, wholesale and road transport. This will save individual businesses time, and costs and will support the sectors to improve their health and safety performance.

ShopCare has a dedicated critical risk workstream and part of the workstream is to obtain a current view of the critical risks within the industry. Here are some insights from the publicly available report.  Overall, fatalities are in a slow decline, but the road transport sector still has the highest number of fatalities as well as an average of 188 days off work in 2021 per “weekly compensation injury claim”. This is the time required by a road transport worker on average to recover from a ‘severe injury’
sustained at work.

The industry average days off work per “weekly compensation injury claim” for 2021 is 134 days. Over the past 6 years, the increase in injury claims is not simply being driven by an increase in the workforce population. Critical risk-related injury claims have risen by 7.8% whilst the workforce in the industry is on a decline by 0.99%. So even with fewer workers in the market, the rate of critical risk-related injuries is on the rise.

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ShopCare has taken an intervention logic approach to reduce the overall industry risk of critical risk-related injuries. We envisage the following outcomes:

• Leveraged learnings

•  Improved performance in individual businesses

•  Improved consistency and standards across the supply chain

•  A wider understanding of what critical risk is and actions

•  Increased uptake of action in non-critical risk areas with high impact e.g., Musculoskeletal injury prevention, etc.

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The workstream continues to drive a campaign to share as much as possible on tools and guidance to support the industry. ShopCare continues to share knowledge and driving engagement through webinars, online events, formal insights and other collaborations will support the process of creating safer workplaces. We are committed to moving the dial and deliver better industry outcomes.