Work-related Liaison Service

Special Investigations Unit Expands

The Special Investigations Unit of the Coronial Services Centre has been strengthened by the addition of a new team - the Work-Related Liaison Service (WRLS).  The new team has been set up in response to community concerns about the social and economic costs of work-related injury.  WRLS is a specialised service improving the depth and quality of coronial investigations into work-related deaths. WRLS essentially provides advice to the Coroner.

The Coronial Service in Victoria is a marriage of two agencies - the State Coroner's Office and the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine. Both agencies work together in the investigation of violent and/or unnatural death. Every year more than 90 people die at work in Victoria and WorkCover's research shows that over the last ten years compensable work-related claims exceeded $13,427 million. To save lives and reduce the burden of these injuries, the Coronial Services Centre is improving their approach.

Coroners are concerned about the rate of work-related death and injury and are looking at where the work systems and equipment design issues may affect the outcome.  Experience has shown that investigations that endeavour to identify systems and design issues can also lead to new, or help strengthen, existing countermeasures.  By helping to build a coroner's investigation that is looking at systems and design issues, the WRLS can assist the community to prevent these deaths.

WRLS will assist the Coroner investigate industrial deaths that are work-related and will also review other complex cases, not usually thought of as work-related, but which may still have lessons for industry, including:

• Deaths on hobby farms or from DIY practices at home
• Deaths causing extreme concern to the community that are possibly preventable, but have only a tenuous link to the work place i.e. deaths of children while visiting their parents at work, a person committing suicide at work, or suggestions that the suicide was due to work-related issues
• Deaths from work related transport/commuting - particularly challenging because of difficulties identifying cases and avoiding duplication of efforts by the police and Major Collisions Investigations Unit, and
• Collisions involving heavy articulated vehicles that may be due to the driver having an underlying health condition.

Industry forums are being considered in these cases, with the WRLS co-ordinating a collaborative approach with all concerned to identify what might be done to prevent such deaths in the future, outlining the respective roles of the workplace and the community.

Enquiries to the unit should be made via Email: wrls@vifm.org

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