Incident Reporting and Analysis

Posted: May. 15, 2019 • By Kevin Kohler

Incident Reporting and Analysis

Safety incidents are bad maybe we shouldn’t report them?

Safety incidents involving a loss are not good news, but they are an important source of information that can be used to improve our safety systems. When we don’t report and investigate incidents, the underlying problems don’t get addressed. The Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS) has this to say about incident investigations:

The important point is that even in the most seemingly straightforward incidents, seldom, if ever, is there only a single cause.

Failing to report and investigate all incidents ultimately leads to more serious accidents because the causes of the incidents have not been addressed.

Do I really need to report every little incident?

Reporting only those serious safety incidents that resulted in a “loss” such as an injury or property damage, is an “after the fact” measure of performance. Referred to as “lagging indicators” they may not occur often enough to provide useful feedback or tell us how effective our safety system is in improving results. To prevent losses, we need to create a culture of reporting:

  • Observed hazards that could have caused an incident (a tripping hazard),
  • Near miss incidents that did not create an actual loss (someone tripped but was not injured).

Hazards and near misses are “leading indicators” that can be evaluated against safety performance.

We report all of the incidents we are required to, isn’t that enough?

Mandatory legislative reporting of safety incidents tend to focus on serious incidents or near miss incidents that are required by:

  • Occupational Health and Safety arms of the government;
  • Workers compensation insurance boards;
  • Energy, environmental and other government agencies and regulators.

The safety statistics that are generated through these reports are pro rated to a standard number of hours worked, such as 200,000 or 1 million to generate rates for:

  • Lost time incidents: missed work for more than one shift;
  • Medical aid incidents: intervention of a health care provider beyond first aid;
  • Modified work incidents: work duties changed to accommodate for an injury;
  • Other serious reportable incidents: violence, explosions, structural failures.

These are important standard benchmarks that are used across similar industries and occupations to compare performance. We should know and abide by our legislative reporting requirements but also recognize that they are generally “lagging indicators” that measure past performance.

What do we do with all these hazard and near miss reports?

If we just file them then there is little point at all. Some steps that we can follow to use these “leading indicators” to improve our safety performance include:

  • Creating a system where reporting of hazards, near misses and incidents is encouraged and easy to do (for example electronically from a mobile device);
  • Making sure that imminent hazards are controlled immediately and shared across the organization;
  • Conducting investigations into root causes and involving workers and health and safety committees;
  • Communicating findings, measuring effectiveness and initiating corrective actions;
  • Providing training across the organization in roles and responsibilities under the incident reporting system.

Best Practices – Analyzing the data

The data generated from our reporting process will be classified according to the loss that occurred, or could have occurred. This might include specific information relating to the incident such as: the type of incident, the property that was damaged, the type of injury and the activities that were being undertaken. The data will then be used for:

  • Statistical analysis: to identify trends (such as increasing trips and slips in the shop), determine the effectiveness of initiatives and identify corrective actions,
  • Graphical analysis: to present findings, show period over period performance and communicate initiatives resulting from our analysis.

The power of reporting hazards and near misses is in analyzing them and implementing improvements to prevent future losses


Related Articles

Corrective Action Tracking

Corrective Action Tracking

What is a corrective action? A corrective action is an action taken to eliminate any undesirable or adverse situation (deficiencies). […]

Read Article
Defensive Driving

Defensive Driving

We often drive for work, it’s not a “big deal” Unfortunately, driving for work is a very big deal from […]

Read Article