What Is a Notifiable Event Under NZ Health & Safety Law?

Short answer: A notifiable event is a serious workplace event — a death, a notifiable injury or illness, or a notifiable incident — that you must report to WorkSafe New Zealand as soon as you know it has happened, and where you must preserve the scene until told otherwise.

The three kinds of notifiable event

Under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015, notifiable events fall into three groups:

• A notifiable death arising from work.
• A notifiable injury or illness — serious harm such as an amputation, a serious burn, a serious head or eye injury, the loss of a bodily function, or an injury requiring admission to hospital for treatment. WorkSafe publishes the full list.
• A notifiable incident — a dangerous occurrence that exposed anyone to a serious risk to health or safety, even if no one was actually hurt. Examples include an uncontrolled escape of a hazardous substance, a collapse or failure of plant, or an electric shock.

The third category catches people out most often, because it's about the potential for serious harm, not the outcome.

What you must do

If a notifiable event happens, you must:

1. Notify WorkSafe as soon as possible — by phone for the serious cases, then in writing within 7 days. WorkSafe's notification line and online form are on their website.
2. Preserve the site so far as is reasonably practicable — don't disturb the scene (beyond helping the injured, making it safe, or acting under a Police or WorkSafe direction) until WorkSafe says you can.
3. Keep a record of the event for at least 5 years.

How to tell quickly

The judgement call — "is this notifiable?" — is easiest when the criteria are in front of you at the moment you're recording the event. Good incident reporting prompts you when an event looks like it may be notifiable, so the decision to call WorkSafe isn't left to memory under pressure. It's a prompt, not a substitute for checking WorkSafe's current criteria.

Don't forget near-misses

Many notifiable incidents are, in everyday language, near-misses — the substance escaped, the scaffold slipped, but nobody was standing there. Capturing near-misses routinely means the serious ones surface as the notifiable events they are, and the rest still teach you something. (See how to report a near miss.)

This is general information, not legal advice — always confirm the current criteria and process with WorkSafe. See how SteadyOn handles incident reporting and notifiable-event prompts, or start a free trial.