Executive Summary
Injuries to horses and humans at Australian race tracks pose a potentially serious threat to the racing industry. Direct losses through time off work for staff and inability to race for horses, as well as medical and veterinary costs are only one component of the problem. More important considerations at the industry level are the industry’s ethical and legal responsibility for animal welfare and occupational health and safety. Failure to meet these obligations (or even being perceived to fail to meet these obligations) could have significant negative impacts on the industry as a whole. One way to guard against this potential threat, and to actively address any welfare or occupational health and safety issues as they arise, is to ensure that up-to-date, reliable and objective data on human and equine injuries is available.

While a number of state based injury reporting initiatives have been considered or commenced, a centralised national system using on-line electronic data storage and a secure web interface would be able to meet stakeholder needs for information at a reasonable cost, as well as avoiding duplication of effort.

The objective of this research was to develop such a system, in order to support animal welfare and occupational health and safety within the racing industry. This report aims to provide industry stakeholders with who are concerned with welfare and OH&S issues and injury surveillance with information about the system that has been developed and the steps required for its full implementation.

The research involved consultation with stakeholders to determine the initial data requirements for an injury surveillance system, a review of existing standards for injury reporting, the development of a database and a software interface to manage the system, and investigation of technical and organisational options for reporting pathways and linkages with existing industry databases.

Draft standard report forms were developed for human and equine injuries, and based on these, the development of a database structure and a web interface for submitting reports to the system, editing and reviewing reports, and analysing data held on the system. The system was built using open source software, including MySQL database, and PHP web scripting language.

A live demonstration version of the system is available on the Internet and is capable of meeting basic industry needs. However a range of options are discussed for full implementation and linkage to other industry databases. To be sustainably implemented, the system must reside within an institutional structure which is able to provide the (small amount of) funding required to run the system, and a representative stakeholder management structure to ensure that it continues to meet the needs of the industry. In addition, a variety of models for data linkage are presented, ranging from a standalone system with no direct linkages (requiring the export of data from both the injury system and other industry databases and linking on the researcher’s computer) to establishment of query connections across the internet to do dynamic linking, to merging systems to use the same database.

A list of tasks required for full implementation is provided.