All posts

Critical controls: the six checks that prevent deaths at home

Mines keep people alive by naming the few controls that stop a fatal event and checking them on a schedule. Here are six for a family home, with how to check each one.

In 2025, 222 Australian workers died from traumatic injuries at work, 1.5 for every 100,000 workers. In mining, 7 workers died, a rate of 2.3 per 100,000. Mining is heavy, remote, high-energy work, and its safety method is built around one idea worth stealing for the family home: the critical control.

What a critical control is

In 2015 the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM) published a good practice guide on critical control management. Its 2026 edition defines a critical control as "a control for a fatal hazard, which is crucial to directly preventing an unwanted event or mitigating the consequences of the event". The absence or failure of one "would significantly increase the likelihood of the unwanted event or the severity of its consequence despite the existence of other controls".

The method has three steps.

  1. Name the events that kill or maim. ICMM calls them material unwanted events. At home: drowning, poisoning, a swallowed button battery, crushing by furniture, a deep scald, electric shock.
  2. Pick the few controls that matter most. Not every good habit. Only the ones whose failure lets the fatal event through.
  3. Verify them. ICMM defines verification as "the process of checking the extent to which the performance requirements set for a critical control are being met in practice". Write down what "working" looks like, then check it on a schedule.

Step 3 is the one homes skip. We fit the fence, buy the lock, strap the drawers, and never look again.

Why verification matters

A Queensland study of 46 children under 5 who drowned in home pools between 2005 and 2015 found the child got in through a gate propped open in 28.3% of cases and a fence in disrepair, often a gate that didn't self-close and self-latch, in 19.6%. The control existed. Nobody checked that it still worked.

The six checks

1. Pool and spa barrier. Stops drowning. In 2024–25, 15 children under 5 drowned in Australia, half of them in home pools.

2. Medicines and chemicals locked. Stops poisoning. About 2,100 children a year are hospitalised for accidental poisoning; 56% are aged 1–4.

3. Button battery compartments secured. Stops battery burns. About 20 children a week go to emergency with a suspected swallowed or inserted button battery, and a lodged battery can cause severe burns in as little as 2 hours.

4. Furniture and TVs anchored. Stops crush injuries. Toppling furniture has killed 27 Australians since 2000, 20 of them children under 7 (figures reported in 2021).

5. Bathroom hot water at 50°C or less. Stops bath scalds. Scalds cause 52% of child burns.

6. Safety switches (RCDs). Stops electric shock. The model Code of Practice lists them as an engineering control.

The check intervals are our suggestions. Follow your state's rules where they differ.

Lead, not lag

Mines measure two things. Lag indicators count harm after it happens. Lead indicators count the checks that prevent it. ICMM notes that fatal events are rare and "as such, weak measures". A year without an injury tells a family little. Six checks done on time, every time, tells it the barriers are working.

Print the home critical controls checklist, put it on the fridge, and do the first round this weekend.

Sources