Most of the difficulty with incident notification is not the reporting. It is knowing, at four in the afternoon with an ambulance on site and a supervisor on the phone, whether this is one of the things you have to ring about.
The answer under the WHS Act comes in three categories, and the third is the one that catches people out.
The three triggers
A notifiable incident is any of:
1. The death of a person. No qualification.
2. A serious injury or illness. The Act defines this by listing it, and the list is about the treatment required rather than the eventual outcome. It covers an injury or illness requiring immediate treatment as an in-patient in a hospital, and immediate treatment for:
- a serious head injury;
- a serious eye injury;
- a serious burn;
- separating of skin from underlying tissue, such as degloving or scalping;
- a spinal injury;
- loss of a bodily function; or
- serious lacerations.
It also covers amputation, and any infection where the work is a significant contributing factor — including infections from work with human or animal matter, or from contact with contaminated material.
3. A dangerous incident. This is the category that gets under-reported, because nobody was hurt.
A dangerous incident is an incident that exposes a person to a serious risk to their health or safety from an immediate or imminent exposure. Whether anyone was actually injured is irrelevant. The listed events include:
- an uncontrolled escape, spillage or leakage of a substance;
- an uncontrolled implosion, explosion or fire;
- an uncontrolled escape of gas or steam, or of a pressurised substance;
- electric shock;
- the fall or release from a height of any plant, substance or thing;
- the collapse, overturning, failure or malfunction of, or damage to, any plant required to be authorised for use by regulation;
- the collapse or partial collapse of a structure;
- the collapse or failure of an excavation, or of any shoring supporting one;
- the inrush of water, mud or gas in workings in an underground excavation or tunnel; and
- the interruption of the main system of ventilation in an underground excavation or tunnel.
A load dropped from a crane onto ground where a team had been standing five minutes earlier is a dangerous incident. Nobody goes to hospital, and it is notifiable.
How fast, and what you have to keep
Immediately. The obligation is to notify the regulator as soon as you become aware that a notifiable incident has occurred, by the fastest possible means — which in practice means a phone call. If the regulator then asks for written notice, you have 48 hours to provide it.
You must also preserve the incident site until an inspector arrives or you are directed otherwise. That means not disturbing the plant, the substances, the arrangement of things — the scene as it stands.
There are express exceptions, and they exist for the obvious reasons. You may disturb the site to:
- assist an injured person;
- remove a deceased person;
- make the site safe or minimise the risk of a further notifiable incident; or
- act under the direction of a police officer or an inspector.
The practical advice from every investigator is the same: photograph everything before you touch anything you are permitted to touch. Wide shots and close shots. Nobody has ever regretted having too many photographs of an incident scene.
You must also keep a record of each notifiable incident for at least five years.
Queensland mines report something different
If your site is a Queensland mine or quarry, none of the above is the regime you are under.
Queensland's mines and quarries sit outside the harmonised WHS framework entirely. They are governed by the Coal Mining Safety and Health Act 1999 and the Mining and Quarrying Safety and Health Act 1999, and they report to Resources Safety and Health Queensland (RSHQ) rather than to the state's WHS regulator.
The categories are different too. Instead of notifiable incidents, a Queensland mine reports:
- deaths;
- serious accidents;
- high potential incidents (HPIs); and
- reportable disease.
A high potential incident is defined as an event, or a series of events, that causes or has the potential to cause a significant adverse effect on the safety or health of a person. It is a deliberately broad definition, and it is broader than the WHS Act's dangerous incident list, because it turns on potential rather than on a set of enumerated events.
Notification is verbal first, with a written incident notification following — and again whenever an incident is subsequently confirmed as an HPI or a disease.
Two things are worth knowing about how this works in practice.
First, RSHQ has publicly raised under-reporting of high potential incidents as a concern in a safety notice to industry. That is a rare and pointed thing for a regulator to do. The practical implication for anyone weighing a marginal call is that the regulator's stated concern is under-reporting, not over-reporting.
Second, the Resources Safety and Health Legislation Amendment Act 2024 removed prescribed specific notifiable incident types from the legislation, which moves the assessment further onto the site's own judgement about potential consequence rather than onto a checklist. If your reporting procedure was written around the old prescribed list, it is out of date.
Who calls when there are two duty holders
On a contracting company site, more than one organisation may have an obligation. The duty falls on any duty holder who becomes aware of a notifiable incident arising out of the conduct of their business or undertaking — so a principal and a contracting company can both hold it for the same event.
Two notifications for one incident is not a problem. Zero is. Agree the protocol before you need it, and make it simple enough to hold under pressure: whoever becomes aware first notifies, and immediately tells the other party that they have.
What gets asked next
The notification is the beginning. What follows, usually within days, is a set of questions about the people involved, and they are specific:
- Who was on site that day, and under whose engagement?
- What was the injured person authorised and qualified to do?
- What evidence of that competency did you hold, and on what date did you last verify it?
- Who supervised the task, and what were they qualified to supervise?
- Had this control failed before?
Every one of those is a records question. An organisation that can answer them from a system, with dates, is in an entirely different position from one assembling answers out of an inbox, a filing cabinet and somebody's memory — particularly when the person who kept the spreadsheet is the person now being interviewed.
