10% of workers made ACC claims last year

Almost one in 10 workers suffered an injury at work last year that led to ACC claims.

Almost three-quarters of the claimants were men, with the highest levels coming from the farming and fishing sectors.

However, overall the level of claims has been steadily falling during the past decade. In 2002, there were 143 claims for every 1000 workers but this has since come down to just 97 for every 1000 in 2011.

In 2011, the number of claims dropped below 200,000 for the first time in a decade with 187,900 claims made for work-related injuries made by 169,400 people.

Since records were released in 2002, men have consistently accounted for almost three-quarters of all work-related claims i.e. 122 claims per 1,000 full time workers.

Young workers (aged 15-24 years) and older workers (aged 65 years and over) had the highest claim rates across all age groups. Last year, just over one in eight workers in those two age groups made a claim for a work-related injury.

Pacific workers had the highest rate across all ethnicities, with 115 claims per 1,000 FTEs.

Agriculture and fishery workers made the most claims, with a rate of 211 per 1,000 FTEs. This was followed by labourers and cleaners (183 claims per 1,000 FTEs), trades workers (180), and plant and machine operators and assemblers (166).

The trend for injury claim rates has been consistently declining with final figures for the period 2002-10 showing a drop in the overall rate of injury claims, from 143 claims per 1,000 FTEs in 2002 to 111 in 2010.

The number of claims for fatal work-related injuries in 2011 was affected by the Canterbury earthquake in February 2011. This disaster resulted in 63 fatal claims in the Canterbury region in 2011, compared with only 9 for the previous year.