An Investigation into the Measurement of Workplace Injury Severity

Abstract

Currently, the New Zealand Injury Information Manager, Statistics New Zealand, is scoping possible injury severity thresholds for workplace injury reporting purposes. Severity levels define which injuries to include within different reporting scenarios. This paper investigates methods of measuring workplace injury severity in Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, and the widely-accepted quantitative approaches to injury severity levels, the ‘Abbreviated Injury Scale’ (AIS) and the ‘International Classification of Disease-Based Severity Score’ (ICISS), and discusses their application to Statistics New Zealand’s workplace injury reporting.