Lay summary
In the aftermath of the catastrophic Pike River Mine explosion New Zealand's poor workplace health and safety record has been under scrutiny. This research seeks to address a deficit in current information on work-related fatal injuries to New Zealand workers which is a significant barrier to progress on reducing work fatalities. This research will address the need for comprehensive and informative fatal injury data by using Coronial data which have been demonstrated to yield high quality, rich information with comprehensive capture of work fatalities to identify targets for policy, interventions for prevention and allow bench marking of safety performance.