Growing health and safety leadership
This is an opportunity for us to grow health and safety leadership amongst accredited employers. By keeping workers safe and providing better support, we can influence a large-scale positive change for almost a quarter of New Zealand's workforce.
We appreciate the time our customers have taken to get involved and share their expertise and views. With the help of our customers, we co-designed a new vision which identifies the ways we can improve the AEP programme
We worked with our customers to better understand their concerns and what would improve AEP to lift workplace health and safety outcomes. Alongside this, our project team worked to review and improve the internal programme features.
Through the co-design process, we identified opportunities for improving the programme as well as the pain points.
Our focus
Co-design focused on specific aspects of the programme including:
- those that impact most on strengthening worker experience
- participation and representation
- improving accredited employers (AEs), third party administrators (TPAs), and programme performance.
Who we worked with
For co-design we worked with our customers, including
- accredited employers and their employees
- unions
- third party administrators
- industry associations eg New Zealand Association of Accredited Employers (NZAAE)
- treatment providers
- other stakeholders eg auditors
- our staff.
We used design methodologies to look for opportunities to improve the programme. These included:
- drop-ins
- focus groups
- one-to-one interviews
- design workshops
- online consultation.
What our customers told us
We learnt that some features of the programme have not functioned as intended. There are also indications that some programme objectives are not being achieved.
It's clear from the feedback that injury management outcomes are not as positive as expected. While satisfaction with injury, claims, and rehabilitation management for employees in the programme is low compared with ACC-managed work claims.
AEs told us they want to improve health, safety and wellbeing for their employees, and to look after them when they’re injured. They want a more relevant audit process and better information from us on how to improve
There are some positive outcomes. The programme currently delivers better return to work outcomes for employees and lower compensation costs than for those not part of AEP.
What's not working for those in AEP?
Our vision is to create a unique partnership with every New Zealander. We want to improve their quality of life by minimising the incidence and impact of injury. AEP is designed to allow AEs to provide the same or better claims and injury management service as ACC to their employees when they have an injury at work.
Currently, the programme is not delivering consistent and positive outcomes for those employed by AEs when they have a work injury. Improving their experience provides the greatest opportunity to move the programme forward. To do this, we need to ensure that employees have the opportunity to influence the work environment and that AEs and TPAs are performing well.
Our customers helped us identify the following pain points: