Before the first bolt is tightened, before the scaffolding rises or the jackhammers rumble to life, the risks are already present.
In Australia’s vast industrial underbelly—from the bone-dry mine shafts of the Pilbara to the fuel-slick decks of oil terminals off the New South Wales coast—most accidents don’t happen by surprise. They are quietly drafted into blueprints, etched into layouts, and embedded in equipment specifications long before the first worker steps on site.
This is the insight at the heart of Prevention Through Design, or PtD—a deceptively modest phrase that signals a seismic shift in how safety professionals, engineers, and regulators think about workplace risk. Not as something to control after the fact, but something to eliminate before it ever has the chance to exist.
The idea is almost subversive in its simplicity: if a platform is too narrow, a valve too high to reach, or a ventilation duct an afterthought, no amount of signage, PPE, or procedural control will truly neutralize the risk. The hazard isn’t on the site—it’s in the design.
And yet, for decades, safety protocols have arrived late in the process. Like stagehands called in after opening night, safety teams were too often tasked with managing the fallout of design decisions already carved in steel and poured in concrete.
That’s beginning to change.
Planning Safety in the Earliest Stages
PtD is the growing movement to involve safety professionals in the earliest stages of industrial and architectural design. It’s about asking different questions from the start—not just Can we build it?, but How will we clean it? Maintain it? Escape it, if something goes wrong?
In Australia, the momentum is building. Regulators, including Safe Work Australia, have begun embedding PtD principles into codes of practice and national guidance. Universities are developing coursework that teaches engineers to think about failure not as a fluke, but as a structural vulnerability waiting to happen.
“Design is where safety lives or dies,” says a senior consultant from Zokal, which has spent more than 35 years working with mining, construction, and industrial operations across the country. “You can train workers all day long—but if the hazard is baked into the infrastructure, you’re starting from behind.”
An Ounce of Prevention…
Critically, PtD doesn’t have to break the bank. “We’re not talking about sweeping redesigns or gold-plated upgrades,” the Zokal consultant adds. “In most cases, the smartest changes are the simplest ones—tweaking the height of a guardrail, relocating a ladder to improve rescue access, or installing a fixed monitor where workers were previously relying on handhelds. These changes cost far less to implement early and save far more down the track.”
And the benefits aren’t abstract. Consider the elevated walkway designed without sufficient fall protection. The switch room installed without safe arc flash boundaries. Or the storage tank with no feasible means of safe internal inspection. Each becomes, in time, a red mark on a risk register—or worse, a coroner’s report.
By contrast, PtD forces collaboration. Designers, builders, and safety specialists sit at the same table, ideally from day one. Hazards are not just “controlled”—they are designed out. The result is not just a safer workplace but a smarter one: fewer injuries, fewer work stoppages, and fewer retrofits.
The term itself—Prevention Through Design—lacks drama. It’s not as punchy as “zero harm” or “safety first.” But in practice, it’s revolutionary. It repositions safety from the margins of project planning to its very center.
Because in the end, safety isn’t just what you wear or how you respond. It’s what you build. And what you build into.