WHS incident notification: what to report, when, and what an inspector asks for

What counts as a notifiable incident

Under the harmonised WHS Act, a notifiable incident is the death of a person, a serious injury or illness of a person, or a dangerous incident, arising out of the conduct of a business or undertaking. The 2025 amendment to the model laws adds three further categories — violent incidents, extended absences and suicides — which apply in a state or territory only once that jurisdiction has adopted them.

Two things follow, and both are where organisations trip. The test is the category, not the severity you perceived — a near miss that could have killed someone is notifiable even though everyone walked away, while a nasty-looking cut that needed a plaster is not. And deaths include people who are not your workers, where there is a causal link to the work; a death from a non-work-related medical condition does not have to be notified.

Serious injury or illness, defined

A serious injury or illness is one that requires the person to have immediate treatment as an in-patient in a hospital, or immediate treatment for one of a specified list of injuries, or medical treatment within 48 hours of exposure to a substance. The test is objective — it turns on whether the injury could reasonably be considered to warrant that treatment, not on whether the person actually received it.

That objective test catches people out: a worker who refuses to go to hospital, or is taken to a clinic instead, has not made the incident un-notifiable. The specified injuries requiring immediate treatment are:

• Amputation of any part of the body.
• A serious head injury.
• A serious eye injury.
• A serious burn.
• The separation of skin from underlying tissue — degloving or scalping.
• A spinal injury.
• The loss of a bodily function.
• Serious lacerations.

Alongside those, any injury or illness requiring immediate treatment as a hospital in-patient is notifiable regardless of what the injury is, and so is any illness requiring medical treatment within 48 hours of exposure to a substance — which is the limb that covers chemical exposures and the infectious-disease categories in the Act.

The category most often missed

Dangerous incidents. A dangerous incident is one that exposes a person to a serious risk to their health or safety from an immediate or imminent exposure to a listed event — and no injury is needed. This is the category organisations systematically under-notify, because nothing visibly bad happened and nobody thought to check the list, which includes:

• An uncontrolled escape, spillage or leakage of a substance.
• An uncontrolled implosion, explosion or fire — including an electrical explosion or arc flash.
• An uncontrolled escape of gas or steam.
• An uncontrolled escape of a pressurised substance.
• An electric shock.
• The fall or release from a height of any plant, substance or thing.
• The collapse, overturning, failure or malfunction of, or damage to, plant.

The list continues — it also reaches the collapse or partial collapse of a structure, an excavation collapse, the interruption of the main ventilation system in an underground excavation, and events prescribed by the regulations. Read your jurisdiction's section rather than working from a memory of it, because the regulations can both add to the list and exclude things from it.

Under-notification is itself a finding. Nobody has ever been prosecuted for notifying something that turned out not to qualify.

What the 2025 amendment added

The model WHS laws were amended in 2025 to widen what must be notified, largely to reflect psychosocial risk. Three additions matter: notifiable violent incidents, a notifiable extended absence where a worker is away from work for 15 or more days because of a work-related injury or illness, and a notifiable work-related suicide or attempted suicide.

A violent incident is one involving physical or sexual assault, or certain other conduct, that exposes a person to a serious risk to their health or safety — including a serious risk of psychological harm. The terms carry their ordinary meanings, and the explanatory material is explicit that the provision is not meant to catch situations without a serious risk.

The extended-absence category is the one that changes how a system has to work. Death, serious injury and dangerous incidents are decided in the first hours. A 15-day absence is decided three weeks later, by someone watching a clock — so it is the category most likely to be missed by an organisation whose incident records and absence records live in different places.

When and how you notify

Immediately after becoming aware of a notifiable incident. Regulators accept notification by phone, by email or through an online form, and where you notify by phone the regulator may require written notice in its approved form within 48 hours. There is no grace period for confirming the facts first.

Preserving the site

The person with management or control of the workplace must take all reasonable steps to ensure the site is not disturbed until an inspector arrives, or the regulator directs otherwise. The duty is deliberately tied to notification: the point of notifying quickly is that the evidence is still there when someone comes to look. The exceptions are narrow — assisting an injured person, removing a deceased person, making the site safe or removing a risk of further harm, and assisting police. Everything else waits.

• Photograph and video before anything moves, from several distances, including the surroundings that seem irrelevant.
• Record who authorised any change to the site, what they changed, and why it fell inside an exception.
• Physically isolate the area and the plant involved. Tags come off after the inspector, not before.
• Get the images off personal phones and into the incident record the same day — this is where evidence is most often lost.

The records an inspector asks for

Rarely just the incident report. An inspector is testing whether the risk was known and controlled before the event, so the request reaches backwards — often months — into risk assessments, training, maintenance and the things workers raised and nobody actioned.

• The notification itself, with the time it was made and by whom.
• The risk assessment or SWMS for the task, and its review history with dates.
• The safe work procedure, and evidence the people involved were trained in that version.
• Licences, tickets, high-risk work licences and verification of competency, current at the date of the event.
• Plant maintenance, pre-start and inspection records for anything involved.
• Induction records for workers and contractors present on the day.
• Consultation records — toolbox talks, HSR involvement, committee minutes, and any concern raised about this task.
• Previous similar incidents and near misses, and what was actually done about them.
• Corrective actions from the last one, and the evidence that they worked.

A PCBU must keep a record of each notifiable incident for at least five years; under the amended model laws the same minimum applies to notifiable extended absences and suicides, running from the day notice was given. Treat that as a floor rather than a policy — anything attached to an event you notified is worth keeping permanently.

Where Victoria is different

Victoria is the only Australian jurisdiction that has never implemented the model WHS laws. Everywhere else — the Commonwealth, ACT, NSW, NT, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania and Western Australia — runs a version of them, adopted at different times, with Western Australia's taking effect on 31 March 2022.

If you operate in Victoria, your obligations come from Victorian occupational health and safety law and WorkSafe Victoria, and the terminology and categories differ. Operating across the border, do not assume one procedure covers both — or that the eight harmonised jurisdictions are identical, because each enacted its own version and each can amend it.

1. 1.List the jurisdictions you work in. Not where your head office is — where the work physically happens.
2. 2.Record the notification channel for each — phone number, online form, and what the regulator requires in writing.
3. 3.Confirm which 2025 changes each has adopted, because the violent-incident, extended-absence and suicide categories will not arrive everywhere at once.
4. 4.Put all of that on one page, where the supervisor will look at 6am, not in a manual.

Questions we get asked