The Ultimate Guide to Safety Incident Management In 2023
Workplace safety is important for all companies across industries. From establishing safety leaders and dedicated teams to oversee the safety compliance measures, we have come a long way in safety management. However, for safety management processes to truly remain successful, businesses must focus on identifying, managing, and mitigating safety issues to prevent them from rising time and again. This is where Incident Management comes into play.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2021 saw a decrease of 1.8% in the number of nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses of 2.7 million cases in 2020. Although the decrease in number shows a positive difference, it is important to revisit Heinrich’s Law which states that
“In a workplace, for every accident that causes a major injury, there are 29 accidents that cause minor injuries and 300 accidents that cause no injuries.”
Regulatory bodies insist safety leaders focus on minimizing minor incidents or near-misses to reduce the number of major accidents. But one person or a set of people cannot be assigned the task of handling the organization’s safety. Everyone across the organization must consider safety and incident management as their responsibility. It is impossible to have a ‘zero incident’ work environment. Nonetheless, companies can prevent most of these workplace incidents with the right processes in place. Employers are legally obligated to implement measures to ensure the safety and health of employees at all times.
Incident management is a set of procedures implemented to mitigate incidents and responses. It includes reporting and communicating incidents, capturing employees and assets involved, identifying root causes, and implementing corrective and preventative actions (CAPAs). Incident management processes are used across organizational functions to centralize all incident data, safety observations, and near misses and get actionable insights to prevent future incidents.
