The heart of risk

So having a birthday makes you feel like you’re getting older, and getting older makes you think more and more about life and death. So on the weekend I thought I’d browse through the Australian Bureau of Statistics website on the latest morbidity statistics; as we all do for a bit of fun on the weekend.


Did you know over the last 2 years, more people have died from accidental falls than from traffic accidents? Of those who died in accidental falls, more than 80% of those were outside the workplace. To me, this shows that risk measures for driving cars, such as speed limits and seatbelts, have greatly reduced the risk of death. At the workplace, Safety standards and procedures have also reduced the risk of injury and death in the workplace as you are more likely to die from a break and enter assault than falling or slipping at work.

These types of deaths fall under the category of “External Causes”. These external causes however only make up 6.2% of all registered deaths in the last 2 years. The number one killer in Australia over that time period was Heart and Circulatory disease accounting 32.9% of deaths.

See risk is both external and internal, and the corporate body is much like our own. We all come to work as individuals to make one corporate body. We all have our particular functions and by working together with one another the corporate body functions as it were meant to. Like the risks associated with our own death, the corporate body is exposed to both external and internal risks. It is the responsibility of each member of the corporate body to be mindful of those risks and to mitigate where possible against those risks.
With this in mind it brings me to the realisation that risk and quality is at the heart of everything we do.