Data + statistics
Injured workers rate their health 10 points worse than a decade ago. Everyone else in work is unchanged.
One of the bleaker lines in Safe Work Australia’s Year 6 scorecard
is that the share of injured workers rating their own health good to excellent fell from
74.0 per cent to 64.0 per cent. The obvious defence is that
Australians in general are less healthy than they were, so of course injured workers are too.
The report itself supplies the control, and it does not support that defence.
Among employed Australians the same broad measure sat at 91 per cent in 2022,
which the scorecard notes is the same as in 2017-18
.
The headline measure, and its control
Indicator c of the National Return to Work Strategy is
The percentage of respondents with good to excellent self-rated health
, asked of injured
workers in the National Return to Work Survey. It has gone one way: 74.0 per cent at the
baseline, 69.2 at Year 3, 64.0 at Year 6. We reported it in the table when we
read the scorecard, alongside eight other
measures that moved away from target.
What we did not do then is use the report’s own controls. Buried in the supplementary
indicators are two measures drawn from the ABS National Health Survey, both of which the
scorecard says exist to provide context for indicator c) General health
. That is an
unusually careful thing for an agency to publish, because a control is what turns a falling
number into a finding or dissolves it.
| Measure | Population | Then | Now |
|---|---|---|---|
| Good to excellent self-rated health (indicator c) | Injured workers, National Return to Work Survey | 74.0% | 64.0% |
| Rate their health good to excellent | Employed people, ABS National Health Survey | 91% (2017-18) | 91% (2022) |
| Has a chronic condition | General population, ABS National Health Survey | 42% (2007-08) | 50% (2022) |
All three from the Year 6 scorecard: indicator c from its national performance measures table, the other two from its supplementary indicators, where the scorecard attributes both to the ABS National Health Survey. Indicator c’s baseline is the average of the 2016 and 2018 surveys and its Year 6 figure is the 2025 survey alone.
What the control rules out
If self-rated health were sliding across the working population, the injured-worker number would be carried along with it and would say little about the compensation system. It is not sliding. On the ABS measure, employed Australians reported the same 91 per cent in 2022 as in 2017-18, across a period covering the pandemic.
So the ten-point fall among injured workers is not the working population’s trend showing through. Something is happening to the health of people who have been injured at work that is not happening to employed people generally.
Do not read the two percentages against each other. 64 against 91 is not a 27-point gap in any meaningful sense: they come from different surveys, asked of different populations, on different schedules. Injured workers would sit below the employed average on any health measure at any time, because they are injured. The comparison that carries weight is between the two directions, one falling steeply and one flat, and that is the comparison the scorecard set up by publishing the control at all.
The other control cuts the other way, a little
The second context measure is less comfortable for the argument above. The proportion of
Australians with a chronic condition has risen steadily: 42 per cent in 2007-08, 42 in 2011-12,
47 in 2014-15, 47 in 2017-18 and 50 per cent in 2022. The scorecard describes
that as having gradually increased over the past 15 years
. Half the population now carries
at least one long-term condition.
That is a genuine background deterioration and it will be part of any story about how injured people recover. But it is a different measure of a different thing: having a diagnosed chronic condition is not the same as rating your own health poorly, and the population it describes includes people who are not working. On the measure that actually matches indicator c, employed people did not move.
Why this matters more than one indicator
Our view, and it is built on the figures above. The Year 6 scorecard reports that worker experiences have generally deteriorated, and the standard reply to any such finding is that the world got harder, not that the system got worse. Here that reply is testable, because Safe Work Australia published the test alongside the result. On the closest available control the world did not get harder for employed people at all.
That does not identify a cause. It narrows the field, which is what a control is for, and it makes the deterioration in the return-to-work measures harder to wave away as background noise. Of the things the scorecard measures, the ones that fell furthest are about how injured people are treated and how they feel afterwards, and the comparison population feels the same as it did in 2017-18.
How we did this
All three series come from the NRTW Strategy Year 6 Key Achievements and Scorecard report, published by Safe Work Australia on 28 April 2026 and read in full: indicator c from the national performance measures table, and the two ABS National Health Survey measures from the supplementary indicators, where the report states in both cases that they are there to give context for indicator c.
We have not gone behind the scorecard to the ABS National Health Survey itself, so we cannot describe its question wording, its sample or how "employed people" is defined there, and we have not implied that the two surveys ask an identical question. That is exactly why the piece compares directions and refuses to subtract one percentage from the other.
The ten-point fall is arithmetic on two published figures. The description of the employed population as flat is the report’s own, not a trend we fitted: it gives two readings, 2017-18 and 2022, and says they are the same.
The section headed Why this matters is opinion, honestly held and built on the figures stated above.
Sources
- Safe Work Australia, NRTW Strategy Year 6 Key Achievements and Scorecard report (PDF, 30 pages), published 28 April 2026, read in full: indicator c and its baseline, Year 3 and Year 6 figures; the two ABS National Health Survey supplementary indicators, their five-point chronic condition series and the 91 per cent employed-population readings; and the statements that both exist to provide context for indicator c.
- Safe Work Australia, NRTW Strategy Year 6 Key Achievements and Scorecard report (publication page): the publication date of 28 April 2026.
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