The process of identifying and evaluating hazards and risks is known as incident management. The goal of incident management is to develop efficient controls and control measures with the goal of limiting the amount of disruption to operations, minimizing negative effects, and preventing recurrence. This and many more will be discussed in this topic “Safety Incident Management System“.
What Is Safety Incident Management System?
An organization’s effective and systematic use of all resources to respond to, control, and comprehend an incident’s cause in order to prevent its recurrence is known as an incident management system. People’s efforts to use processes and tools to manage incidents are combined.
All employees, stakeholders and the safety officers of the company, are involved in this. In order to respond to an incident, it is necessary to first make the incident known or report it. To ensure that the incident is properly documented and that the appropriate response is provided, any employee who has witnessed or experienced one should immediately report it to the appropriate authority.
The following steps must be taken whenever an incident occurs as part of the incident management process:
- Investigation and analysis, incident closure, incident reporting, and corrective action.
Tools for reporting incidents such as an incident report form, an incident management checklist, or an incident report app that aids in the immediate capture of incident details and the assignment of corrective actions for a speedy response are essential.
Incident management is a continuous, around-the-clock responsibility that requires constant vigilance to ensure that the workplace is protected from identified risks. Incident reporting is an essential first step in incident management that notifies others of an incident and prompts appropriate action. It is imperative that any and all information that may aid in comprehending the incident be gathered and reported right away.
What information should be gathered for an incident report?
The person in charge of reporting an incident should inquire about the following when gathering information for the report:
What kind of incident occurred, who was involved, where the incident occurred, when it occurred, how severe the incident was, and, if possible, why it occurred. The incident report can also include photographs to better convey the nature and extent of the incident.
In a perfect world, we could dream of zero incidents/accidents at work. Sadly, this is not the case. The International Labor Organization (ILO) reports approximately 402 million occupational accidents and 189 million illnesses related to work each year. What happens next after an accident happens? What measures have been taken to stop it from happening again?
The obligation to ensure the health and safety of workers is imposed by law on the employer. However, even when every precaution is taken to avoid accidents and incidents at work, risky circumstances can still arise. As a result, businesses rely on an efficient incident management procedure to keep their business operations running smoothly. The set of actions and procedures to respond to, resolve, and prevent a hazardous event from occurring again is known as the incident management process.
Accidents/dangerous events that can take place in the workplace and result in injuries to workers or damage to equipment are unplanned.
All employers and their EHS departments constantly strive to reduce accidents to create a safer and healthier workplace.
Incident Statistics
It is much more difficult to avoid reporting workplace accidents that result in fatalities. According to the ILO, occupational diseases and accidents account for around 2.9 million deaths annually. Companies all over the world are putting in a lot of effort to cut down on fatal accidents. For instance, the rate of fatal injuries per 100,000 workers in Great Britain has decreased from 1.10 in the early 2000s to 0.38 in 2021 and 2022, with 123 deaths attributed to workplace accidents in 2022.
Over the past 12 years, the EU countries have also observed a downward trend in occupational accidents. However, over the past 12 years, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has recorded approximately 5000 fatal accidents in the United States of America (USA). We must note that the rate of fatal injuries increased by approximately 8% in 2021.
From the early 2000s to the present, the number of non-fatal incidents (injuries and illnesses) reported in the United States has decreased by approximately 50%. However, the situation in 2020 was exceptional—the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 33.2 percent of the illnesses that were reported were associated with Covid-19. We still observe a 52 percent increase in work-reported illnesses in 2021 compared to the pre-Covid period in 2019. When we examine the data for the years 2021 and 2019, we find that the number of injuries that were reported decreased by 8%.
The same downward trend is observed for workplace non-fatal injuries in Great Britain, according to the Labour Force Survey (LFS). From the estimates, the number of reported non-fatal workplace injuries decreased by approximately 58%, from approximately 4000 per 100,000 workers in 2000/01 to 1790 in 2021/22. Due to the full return of business operations in 2022, there is a slight increase in comparison to the results of 2021.
Even without taking into account the Covid-19 outbreak, the rate of illnesses that were reported in both the United States and Great Britain had remained relatively constant over the years.
Every time there is a workplace accident, every employer must respond and report it. From the accident site investigation to the implementation of corrective and preventative measures, this encompasses numerous procedures. A company must have an efficient incident management procedure in order to achieve this.
The goal of effective incident management is to take corrective action without allowing the accident to affect the company’s performance or activities.
What Are The Steps And Protocols Following An Incident?
The employee(s) responsible for the incident should inform their manager immediately. This triggers a series of responses that eventually result in corrective actions.
A completed form should be sent to the country’s health and safety department by the employer. For instance, under the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases, and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations (RIDDOR) law in Great Britain, it is the employer’s responsibility to report every occupational death, disease, and accident and to keep the appropriate records. Employers in the United States of America face the same situation when it comes to the “OSHA Injury and Illness Recordkeeping and Reporting Requirements.”
The investigation begins when an accident occurs. To determine the extent of the incident, each company has its own incident notification form. Also, the business has an incident investigation form for thoroughly documenting each accident.
After collecting all of the information and facts, they are analyzed to identify the incident’s underlying cause and the perpetrators. The kind of accident determines how the incident management team will intervene. Depending on the risk and accident assessment of the company, if it is minor, it can be resolved quickly and easily without escalating the incident. In this instance, no additional actions are required.
There are Safety Incident Management Software that make the job easier for both the employer and employee. Incident management software provides you with a one-stop solution to streamline and automate your health and safety efforts.
Some of them use robust analytics to help reduce claims and enables customers to gain access to essential information regarding workplace safety and establish a solid safety culture.
ProcessMAP’s Incident Management system is one of them. It is customized to meet your specific organizational needs and is used by Fortune 500 clients worldwide in over 90 countries. With the help of the Six-Sigma-based incident investigation, you can take charge and boost your company’s overall safety performance. This solution contributes to the management of workplace safety and covers different types of incidents such as:
- In-depth Trend Analysis which enables users to monitor key performance areas that require follow-up and identify key areas of focus for better decision-making.
- Scalable, Secure Platform which is adaptable to various managerial levels. A user-friendly interface takes into account your specific business procedures and operational preferences.
- Boosting Morale as it assigns ownership for individual safety responsibilities, which serves as a mechanism for encouraging your workforce to adopt safe behaviors.
- Intuitive Platform which is a sleek and extremely user-friendly interface offering a performance snapshot and a drill-down view. It allows users to immediately create a flash record following an incident.
The most important components of an incident response management program are: A team in charge of responding to an incident, a plan for responding to an incident, and tools used to automate and simplify the process’s stages.
The following steps in an Incident should be clearly outlined in your team’s incident response plan, including who is responsible for what, and what documentation and notifications are required:
- Respond to threats;
- Classify incidents according to their severity;
- Minimize a threat to prevent additional damage;
- Eliminate the threat by eliminating its root cause;
- Restore production systems;
- Perform post-mortem and take preventative measures.
Safety incident management system could also span to the cyberspace of the company. In this case, each role should be made aware of their duties in detail.
Security analysts, IT and security engineers, threat researchers, legal and risk management, corporate communications, human resources management, and external security forensics specialists are all incident response managers.
Modern security organizations use technological tools to detect and even automatically respond to security incidents. If incident response teams are present in the environment of the organization, they can make use of the following security tools:
- Security Information and Event Management, or SIEM – a tool that gathers data and logs from applications, infrastructure, network security tools, firewalls, and other similar components. Combines data from different sources, generates alerts to alert security teams of malicious activity, and makes it possible to continue investigating.
- Endpoint Detection and Response or EDR, which is typically implements as agents on servers, workstations, cloud endpoints, and laptops can perform automated control such as isolating a device from a network or wiping and re-imaging it, and can enable real-time investigation of breaches.
- Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) finds suspected malicious traffic by capturing, recording, and analyzing network data and communication patterns, allows security incidents to be detected and dealt with across the core network, operational network, and cloud network.