Type of occurrence classification system (TOOCS) 3rd Edition

The Type of Occurrence Classification System (TOOCS) was first developed to provide a comprehensive and nationally consistent system of classifying work-related injuries and diseases across various workers compensation claims systems. 

The TOOCS has developed over time and since expanded to be the primary work-related injury and disease incident classification system in Australia, supporting both the coding of incidents across various workers compensation systems and the production of national work health and safety statistics including: 

• National Data Set for Compensation-based Statistics (NDS).
• Traumatic Injury Fatalities Database (TIF). 

The most current version of the TOOCS, edition 3 revision 2 (TOOCS3.2), defines several hierarchical coding structures used across these datasets, including:

• Nature of Injury or Disease Classification (Nature)
• Bodily Location of Injury or Disease Classification (Bodily Location)
• Mechanism of Incident Classification (Mechanism), and
• Agency of Injury or Disease Classification (Agency).

Nature refers to the most serious injury or disease sustained or suffered by the worker.

Bodily location refers to the part of the body affected by the most serious injury or disease.

Mechanism identifies the overall action, exposure or event that best describes the circumstances that resulted in the most serious injury or disease.

Agency is used to code both Breakdown agency and Agency of injury or disease.

• The Breakdown agency is intended to identify the object, substance or circumstance that was principally involved in, or most closely associated with, the point at which things started to go wrong and which ultimately led to the most serious injury or disease.
• The Agency of injury or disease refers to the object, substance or circumstance directly involved in inflicting the injury or disease.

For simplicity, the naming conventions used to refer to hierarchy levels across these coding structures have been standardised to:

• Classification (referring to the 0-digit coding level)
• Major Group (referring to the 1-digit coding level)
• Sub Major Group (referring to the 2-digit coding level)
• Minor Group (referring to the 3-digit coding level)
• Sub Minor Group (referring to the 4-digit coding level)