The East Coast had 20 entitlement claims per 1000 FTEs, which could include additional payments such as death benefits, loss of earning payments, lump sums, and rehabilitation payments.
This was six higher than the incidence rate of 14 entitlement claims per 1000 FTEs for more serious work injuries across the whole country.
Government work safety body WorkSafe received notification of 137 serious harm incidents in the Bay in 2015 compared to 43 in Gisborne. Last year through to 31 March there had been 41 incidents in the Bay and 14 in Gisborne. This number had fallen each year from a high of 282 incidents in 2012.
Nationwide in 2016 provisional data, 233,000 claims were made to the Accident Compensation Corporation for a work-related injury, which was up about 2500 from the final 2015 data. 30,700 of these were for more serious claims, which was down about 1400 claims in 2015.
The high figures for the East Coast are thought to be due to the high proportion of workers being in the agriculture, forestry and fishing industry, which had the second-highest injury rate after arts and recreation services industry.
This year alone Gisborne has had three fatal forestry accidents while Hawke's Bay has had two fatal work place accidents, one in a juice factory and the other on a farm.
Meanwhile Wellington had the lowest incident rate with 71 claims per 1000 FTEs and was likely to be because the region had a large proportion of workers in the three industries with the lowest injury rates.
These incident rates have decreased in all regions since 2002, however the decrease had slowed since 2012 and in recent years some regions had shown slight increases.
Hawke's Bay and Gisborne, along with Northland who had 136 claims, Tasman, Nelson, Marlborough and the West Coast who had 134 claims and Otago who had 128, showed this overall declining trend.
Since 2010, these four region rankings have stayed the same.
These provisional figures were based on work-related injury claims accepted by the Accident Compensation Corporation.
