What do you pay ACC for? What do you get for your ACC levies? How can Experience Rating work for you? How can ACC work for you?
If business understood ACC then the question as to whether they are good bed fellows with health & safety would be a moot point. Short answer, yes, definitely.
The longer answer is a bit more nuanced.
When it comes to having an ACC claim at work, there must have been a failure in health and safety of some sort. On average, workers do not get hurt randomly and there is usually a causal link to an event. Causal is an ACC term that pretty much underpins workplace claims – as in, there has to be a cause for an injury to be accepted. More on that later.
If we were to review your claim history for the last 5 years, you may be surprised (assuming you have had a few claims) that the average time it takes for a worker to get help after the day they hurt themselves is upwards of 7 or 8 days. In fact, it may well be double figures. We have seen delays of 30 days, 70, 90, 210, 300 days. You give me a number and we’ve probably seen it.
How can we review that you ask? ACC’s ‘MyACC’ portal is rather handy for most things ACC. Haven’t heard of it? Contact us.
Let’s reflect on the time delay. If it takes a worker up to or over a week (or longer) to get help, that means the worker is working injured. This will hardly make them a productive worker let alone a safe or happy one.
This is something that your Health & Safety framework should capture. After all, a fundamental job in Health & Safety is to keep workers safe which we may be failing on in this regard.
Could this be a useful objective / KPI for your Health & Safety Committee – to have workers get help for injuries within 3 days of hurting themselves? Or perhaps within 48 hours or even 24 hours as that is certainly possible? Employers are doing that right now.
Your MyACC also provides a great insight into what ACC claims are recorded against the business. Do you have corresponding internal incident reports for these?
Our experience suggests that there is often a disconnect. There are typically more ACC recorded claims than internal reports. This would make another great objective – 100% match between what is recorded in MyACC and our internal incident forms.
A third area, and one to excite the owners / senior management is having clear targets in Experience Rating.
Experience Rating is the discount / penalty scheme on your ACC levies. Penalties can be as high as 100% of your levies and discounts up to 50% - so quite a spread. The final outcome is fully driven by workplace claims or should I say any claim that has been lodged as a workplace claim. The bit that gets people excited is to move your Experience Rating into the discount space - saving you money.
Not all workplace claims should impact your penalties even if they may actually be a legitimate claim. Things like pre-existing injuries / aggravation; overuse injuries; underlying health conditions; motor vehicle claims; ACC not following process are all claims that can be challenged and removed from your profile.
I mentioned causation above. For a claim to be accepted there has to be causation – that is a specific event that caused the injury. Sometimes workers can be mischievous and say they hurt their back but no one witnessed it and it was around the corner from CCTV cameras. Sound familiar?
These are the claims that typically show up on MyACC but not your incident reports. So when we proactively monitor and review these via our Health & Safety Committee, we have visibility and can control them.
We think ACC and Health & Safety should be considered side by side - they both impact each other and when you manage one you also manage the other. The kicker is that your health and safety Team can actually drive the ACC levies into the discount space.
