Work undertaken on the review
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In 2022, a framework to review Schedule 2 was developed and subsequently approved by Cabinet. The design of the framework supports MBIE’s regulatory stewardship of the AC Act and allows MBIE to determine if a review is required every 5 years. There are 7 stages in the review process ranging from the initial determination that a review is required to evaluation of the framework itself.
In December 2022, officials from MBIE and ACC determined that a review of Schedule 2 should be undertaken, and in January 2023 the then Minister for ACC (Hon Carmel Sepuloni) informed the House of Representatives that this would occur. Officials then ran a public consultation through April to May 2023 seeking the public’s suggested additions to Schedule 2.
Following this, MBIE contracted Allen + Clarke to procure and manage a panel of independent health experts (the panel) and support them in undertaking an evidence review on the public’s suggested additions, alongside the ILO List (as revised in 2010), and the Safe Work Australia Deemed Diseases List.
Triaging of the diseases and exposures for the panel
The first stage of Allen + Clarke’s work to support the review of Schedule 2 was the development of a triaging framework to organise the list of potential additions to be presented to the panel.
Triaging the conditions was vital in the interests of keeping the workload for the panel manageable and ensuring their evidence review was completed in a reasonable timeframe.
Allen + Clarke’s approach to triaging was informed by a preliminary review of the suggested additions from the public submissions, along with disease and exposure pairings listed in the ILO List and Deemed Diseases Lists. This preliminary review assessed the level of existing information and indicated if the pairing would have a good level of available evidence for the panel to assess.
The initial triaging exercise enabled Allen + Clarke to slim down the significant volume of pairings for the panel to assess. Suggested additions which would not have been appropriate for inclusion in Schedule 2 were withdrawn and those left were sorted into 7 categories with 5 outcomes: automatic selection for panel consideration; targeted evidence review; high quality evidence review; fast search for sufficient evidence; fast search with inadequate evidence; not included for panel consideration. This produced a wide-ranging but manageable list of suggestions for panel consideration in the final report.
In November 2023, the panel completed their evidence review and, in their report, recommended 14 disease/exposure pairings for inclusion on Schedule 2.