Why is incident reporting necessary

The data gathered after every report will help management implement new policies and regulations that will keep employees safe. Every workplace incident should be reported, documented, and investigated. Every incident report should also be stored in a manner that allows your company to trend incident report data to prevent them from happening in the future.

This includes a report for each of the following situations and others:. Every workplace should also have a program to report hazards, such as unsafe behavior and conditions, to management. Don't let the incident report process get overwhelming, check out our incident and investigation software! Generally, an accident is an unplanned, unwanted event that was random and could not have been prevented.

An incident would be an unplanned, unwanted event as well but a different term is used because it could have been prevented. According to OSHA, nearly all workplace illnesses, injuries, and fatalities are preventable , so they suggest using the term incident.

All incidents, near misses, or injuries need to be reported immediately. Fast reporting on mobile incident apps allows for more accurate incident details, better investigations, and fast corrective actions. No employee should have to question whether or not their incident is worthy of an incident report.

Every employee needs to be trained on the incident reporting process their company uses when they join the company. Employees should also be made familiar with the incident report form and a regularly held safety meeting is a great place to include refresher information on the incident reporting process. At minimum, every company must provide a standard incident report form that every employee knows how to locate, complete, and submit. The recommended method for reporting incidents is providing either employees or supervisors with an incident report app that allows them to fill out an incident report in the field.

These reports will then be sent to the appropriate safety personnel to conduct an investigation. The investigations and any follow up can then be handled by the appropriately trained party in your company. Ideally, this training is included as part of the on-boarding process for every employee. Another approach is to have the safety manual, with incident reporting included, be required reading for all employees the first week on the job.

Throughout the year, holding periodic safety meetings on the hazard, near-miss, and incident reporting processes is always a great idea. Some companies may require employees to report directly to HR or their immediate supervisor to file a report.

Typically, and at minimum, a company should provide a standard incident report form that every employee knows how to locate and any employee can complete and submit.

After any incident report is submitted, it should be taken seriously. There should never be any punitive damages associated with any employee filing an incident report. The incident reporting follow-up process should include an investigation into the incident, medical care provided to the employee if needed , corrective actions implemented immediately and preventive actions implemented as deemed necessary to prevent future incidents of the same nature. Only then should the incident report be closed and filed.

All incident reports should be saved in a secure location. All employers are required to notify OSHA when an employee is killed on the job or suffers a work-related hospitalization, an amputation as a result of a work-place incident, or the loss of an eye on the job. A fatality must be reported within 8 hours. Hospitalization, amputation and eye loss must be reported within 24 hours. Refer to the following resources that provide more guidance on how to investigate a workplace incident.

Hosting a safety meeting on incident reporting is an excellent way to get the word out to employees about your incident reporting process and expectations. With our low monthly subscription, every company no matter how many employees! Use as many safety topics as you need, as often as you want! Start right now and get a full suite of safety meeting topics, toolbox talks, and safety resources to expand, upgrade, or jump-start your safety training program.

Click the button below to find out more! Take advantage and grab your free set of safety meeting topics today by clicking the button below. A membership to Weeklysafety. Included in your membership are hundreds of safety topics that you can use for your safety meetings, toolbox talks and safety moments. Take a look at our website to learn more about everything that comes with a Weeklysafety. The average cost of occupational accident ranges from thousands to tens of thousands euros between industries and countries.

Each organisational culture is a set of habits, values, thoughts and beliefs. In organisation-level development areas such as health, safety, quality and environment, the habits are the keystones that affect the culture the most. If you want to create safety culture, start collecting safety observations. If you want to create culture of quality improvement, start collecting quality observations.

If you want to raise environmental awareness, start collecting environmental observations. As we can see, there are multiple different points contributing to the importance of incident reporting. If we were able to convince you why it is important to report incidents, you might now be asking yourself how to do in the most effective way.

And if you are, we've got you covered! We at Plan Brothers have developed a product called incy. It is easy to build incident reporting forms, enrich them with different question types, assign observations to the right people, ask follow-up questions, close the ones that have been handled and monitor the overall performance from the automated statistics. There are a lot more features in the tool, but you aren't here for a spec sheet.

That is why we are offering a day trial so you can take your time testing it out for FREE. If you are interested, click the button below and fill in the required information to get started:. We're a tech company with a passion for helping our customers adapt to the fast changing VUCA world.