Work health and safety obligations apply to everyone involved in a business. Ensure you meet your obligations by familiarising yourself with the laws and following them.

If you don't meet your work health and safety obligations, you are putting people's health and even their lives at risk. You are also breaking the law and you may face penalties or prosecution.

Read more about how work health and safety laws will affect your business.

Business owners and employers

If you operate a business, you are legally required to provide and maintain a safe and healthy workplace for yourself and your workers, volunteers, customers and visitors.

Work health and safety legislation requires you to:

• ensure safe systems of work
• ensure safe use and handling of goods and substances
• provide information, instruction, training and supervision to your workers to ensure they are safe
• assess risks and implement appropriate measures to manage and control them
• report notifiable incidents to Workplace Health and Safety Queensland (WHSQ)
• investigate incidents and take action to avoid having something similar happen again
• provide workers' compensation insurance.

Learn more about personal safety in the workplace.

Workers

Workers have work health and safety obligations to themselves and their workmates. As a worker, you must:

• comply with instructions given for work health and safety
• use personal protective equipment if your employer provides it and if you are properly trained to use it
• not wilfully or recklessly interfere with or misuse anything provided for work health and safety at the workplace
• not wilfully place others at risk
• not wilfully injure yourself.

Legislation

Workplace Health and Safety Queensland (WHSQ) monitors work health and safety in Queensland businesses. WHSQ enforces work health and safety laws and conducts inspections and investigations to ensure employers and others are meeting their obligations.

To understand your obligations and safety requirements, you must be familiar with:

• Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (WHS Act), which imposes obligations on people at workplaces to ensure work health and safety
• Work Health and Safety Regulation 2011, which describes what must be done to prevent or control certain hazards which cause injury, illness or death
• work health and safety codes of practice, which are designed to give practical advice about ways to manage exposure to risks common to industry.

If there is a regulation that describes how to manage a risk in your business, you must follow it. In the case of a code of practice, duty holders must comply with an approved code of practice under the WHS Act or follow another method, such as a technical or an industry standard, if it provides an equivalent or higher standard of work health and safety to the standard required in this code. If there is no regulation or code of practice, you must take reasonable precautions and choose an appropriate way to minimise the risk.

WHSQ inspectors help employers to develop and improve work practices in the workplace. If you fail to meet your health and safety obligations, an improvement notice or prohibition notice may be issued. Read more about compliance and enforcement.

Also consider...

• View our Tools for your small business webinar for information on safety fundamentals for small business, how to access resources, implement ideas and keep you and your workers safe.
• Find out about workplace inspections.
• Find out about legal obligations when training staff.

You should be proactive in preparing for workplace incidents, as they can have a dramatic impact on your business - for example, loss of staff, decreased productivity, and repair and rehabilitation costs.

By law, you must report certain incidents such as a death, serious injury or illness to Workplace Health and Safety Queensland (WHSQ). You may face penalties if you fail to report these events. You are also legally obligated to prepare for emergency situations, such as fire.

Preparing for workplace incidents

Develop and implement a safety management system for addressing incidents in your workplace before they happen. A safety management system combines information, resources and processes that you need to manage work health and safety.

WHSQ's Safety fundamentals toolkit can help you develop your own safety management system. It includes advice on:

• achieving commitment from managers
• consulting with staff
• safe work procedures
• training and supervision
• reporting incidents
• workers' compensation and return-to-work programs.

Preparing for emergency situations

You must follow the Building Fire Safety Regulation 2008 to ensure you are prepared in case of fire or other emergency situations.

The Queensland Fire Department offer comprehensive fire safety training and a range of other products and services for workplaces in businesses and industry.

You should also consider emergencies specific to your location, such as floods or cyclones, and implement plans for dealing with them. Learn more about preparing your business for emergencies and disasters.

Reporting and recording workplace incidents

You are legally required to report a 'notifiable' workplace incident immediately after becoming aware that it has occurred. If you fail to report a notifiable incident, you may face penalties. Notifiable incidents include:

• death
• serious bodily injury
• work-caused illness
• dangerous events
• dangerous electrical events
• serious electrical incidents
• major accidents.

You can notify WHSQ by phoning 1300 362 128 or by using the online incident notification form.

Other 'non-notifiable' incidents don't need to be reported; however, WHSQ recommends that you record and investigate them so that you can prevent something similar from happening again.

Investigating workplace incidents

You must investigate workplace incidents, whether they are reported to WHSQ or not, and find a solution.

To investigate an incident, you need to collect information and establish facts about the incident - who was involved, what happened, where and how it happened, and why. This information will help you work out how to fix the problem. You may appoint work health and safety officers, work health and safety representatives, or committees to conduct an internal investigation and make recommendations.

Resolving and recovering from workplace incidents

Once you have completed an investigation of a workplace incident and found a solution, you should reassess work health and safety policies, procedures and systems. You may need to implement new guidelines for safe work, review staff training and change work spaces and equipment.

A workplace incident may involve workers' compensation. Under workers' compensation laws, you may be required to develop a rehabilitation return-to-work plan for an injured worker. Read more about workers' compensation.

Learn about preparing an incident response plan as part of your business continuity planning.

Also consider...

• Read about legal obligations when training staff.
• View our Tools for your small business webinar for information on safety fundamentals for small business, how to access resources, implement ideas and keep you and your workers safe.

All businesses, regardless of their structure or size, must have a work health and safety risk assessment that is current and meets legal obligations.

Your risk management plan should identify risks in your business. The plan will describe ways to minimise the likelihood of an incident by including 'controls' – measures to either prevent or manage hazards. To make your risk management plan more effective, you need to monitor the risks and review and update the plan regularly.

A strong risk management plan, as part of a larger business continuity plan, will improve your business resilience and help you recover from incidents.

Risks and hazards

A hazard is something with the potential to cause harm. A risk is the likelihood that the harm will occur from exposure to the hazard. For example, if you have identified electricity as a potential hazard in your workplace, the risk is the likelihood that a worker might be electrocuted because of exposure to electrical wires that are inadequately insulated.

Workplace hazards involving the risks of illness or injury may include:

• hazardous substances and dangerous goods – for example: hazardous substances and dangerous goods, asbestos, lead and waste management
• flammable substances – for example: LPG, acetylene, methane, ethanol, petrol, acetone, resins, and thinners for their fire and explosion risks and prevention
• biological hazards and infectious diseases – for example; legionella and Hendra virus
• physical hazards – for example: equipment, confined spaces, electrical hazards and working at heights
• manual tasks hazards – for example: the use of the human body to perform any kind of manual task
• environmental hazards – for example: noise, lighting, surrounding environment (including uneven floor surfaces, etc.), cold, dust and heat stress
• psychosocial hazards – for example: mental injury, fatigue, work-related stress, workplace harassment and occupational violence.

Find out more about managing hazardous chemicals in the workplace.

Risk management legislation

Under the How to manage work health and safety risks code of practice 2021 (PDF, 670KB), to properly manage exposure to risks you must:

1. look for the hazards
2. determine who might be harmed and how
3. decide on control measures
4. put controls in place
5. review the controls.

Control measures should be implemented in the following order:

1. Get rid of the harm or prevent the risk.
2. If this is not possible
   • replace with something less harmful
   • separate people from the harm
   • change work processes or the physical work environment (e.g. by redesigning work, plant, equipment, components or premises)
   • apply administrative arrangements (e.g. limit entry or time spent in a hazardous area)
   • use personal protective equipment.

Also consider...

• View our Tools for your small business webinar for information on safety fundamentals for small business, how to access resources, implement ideas and keep you and your workers safe.
• Read more about managing risks and hazards.
• Learn more about identifying business risk.
• Find out how to manage people through change.
• Read about information technology risk management.
• Find out how you can use the PPRR risk management model to address work health and safety risks.
• Read about pandemic risk management for business.
• Learn how an incident response plan can help your business deal with crises.
• Find out how a recovery plan can help minimise losses and get your business running again.
• Learn more about personal safety in the workplace.
• Read how to create a safe workplace when starting your business.

You can improve how your business manages work health and safety by using the following helpful resources.

Build business resilience

Improve how you will deal with workplace incidents by developing a business continuity plan and conducting a comprehensive analysis of how your business could be affected by various possible incidents.

If your business does suffer from a major incident, having a business continuity plan could help you continue to operate and avoid having to close.

A business continuity plan includes a risk management plan, a business impact analysis, an incident response plan and a recovery plan.

Improve your safety performance through safety leadership

Workplace Health and Safety Queensland's (WHSQ) Safety Leadership at Work program is designed to improve safety culture and contribute to reducing work related injuries and fatalities in Queensland workplaces. Join the free program and learn how to influence and build a positive safety culture through:

• webinars, forums and safety leadership events (receive special membership rates)
• films, benchmarking tools and case studies
• updates on leading industry practices
• direct access to business leaders to apply their learnings directly to your own business
• networking opportunities to explore solutions to common issues and influence your industry's safety culture.

Work-related psychological injuries

You can access information and resources on WorkSafe Queensland to help you understand and better manage work-related mental injuries in the workplace.

• Mental injury essentials offers factsheets and videos to improve your knowledge about work-related mental injury so you can help workers recover sooner and prevent future injuries in the workplace.
• Guiding the way:  responding to mental injury at work outlines the steps to take to help you confidently respond when a worker experiences a work-related mental injury or poor mental health.

Access WHSQ resources

If you are a Queensland employer with a WorkCover Queensland policy, you can access the Injury Prevention and Management (IPaM) program.

Read more about the IPaM program.

WHSQ also offers:

• information on workplace training, which helps ensure staff have the skills and knowledge they need to perform their work safely
• business events on a range of topics
• information on specific hazards, educational resources for small business to medium businesses, industry sectors and occupations
• up-to-date information in the eSAFE newsletter.

Also consider...

• Read about legal obligations when training staff.
• Learn about personal safety in the workplace.
• View our Tools for your small business webinar for information on safety fundamentals for small business, how to access resources, implement ideas and keep you and your workers safe.