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.

What is Safety Incident Management?

In the world of safety management systems, incident management focuses on learning from accidents and setting up protocols that prevent the same or similar incidents from repeating. With incident management, a company can prevent accidents and diminish the organization’s safety risks while course-correcting processes open to safety incidents.

Role of Incident Management in Safety Culture

To achieve an enterprise-wide safety culture, everyone in the organization must look at health and safety metrics beyond the confines of regulatory needs. Organizations must learn from real incidents and near misses and mitigate their processes, so they don’t repeat. For instance, if a machine is known to create accidents, organizations must first mitigate the problem at hand to handle the incident. Once the situation is diffused, the same machine must be tested to identify and address other safety concerns immediately. This approach allows the organization to move from a reactive to a proactive approach to safety management and gives the employees a sense of safety while working on the shop floor. Furthermore, safety leaders must also take a predictive approach and schedule periodic maintenance to ensure accidents do not occur again.

By combining reactive, proactive, and predictive approaches, leaders can assure employees of safety in the workplace.

Incident management must be considered a cornerstone in creating a safety culture. With the help of a robust system, the incident management process ensures that all data is provided, approved, and available for reporting. With incident management, organizations can focus on

Maintaining a record of safety-related incidents reported.
Involving the right personnel to address the safety issues.
Conduct periodic reviews to ensure safety risks do not turn into near-misses or incidents.

Examples of Incidents

There are various types of safety incidents, including –

Slips, trips, or falls
Temporary or permanent structural collapse
Confined space accidents, including suffocation, slips, explosions, fire, etc.
Electrical accidents such as electric burns, shock, or electrocution
Workplace violence
The falling object onto an employee accident
Fire and explosion
Moving machinery accidents
Machine entanglement
Stress-related injury
Transportation accidents

Why are Companies Moving from Manual to Cloud-based Incident Management?

A cloud-based safety incident management system can be crucial for businesses prioritizing safety. Here are some reasons:Traditional spreadsheets and ledgers are becoming a thing of the past. Businesses that operate globally need a more comprehensive system to keep track of accidents, maintain compliance, and monitor near-misses. Paper-based manual incident management restricted this process as it became difficult to get to the bottom of a near-miss or respond to an incident immediately. A cloud-based incident management software allows the management to record safety incident workflow from logging to recording and resolving the incidents. Combined with a next-generation EHS solution, it allows businesses to take their safety processes to a whole new level. Cloud-based incident management also helps increase accountability and transparency by replacing paper-based forms, document handling, and checklist management with a fully automated, unified, cloud-based safety solution.

Implementing incident management solution results offers various benefits, including –

Better Communication as the status of an incident is recorded via text, email, or incident mobile apps.
Easy Accessibility to incident management solutions allows employees to enter, manage, or update incident details from multiple locations.
Organize and color-code incidents by status so nothing gets ignored to eliminate errors.
Digital Paper Trail can be accessed anytime to protect assets from potential liabilities.
Customization gives the business operation flexibility in reporting incidents related to the operation.
Alerts and Notifications about an incident can be sent to multiple employees or supervisors.
Manage Procedures based on incident type so that the employees know what to do when a specific incident occurs, which requires predetermined response initiatives.
Allocate Resources based on the details of incidents helps to determine the performance according to their response time to an incident.
Manage Operational Tasks with automatic notifications by text, email, or incident mobile apps to teams.
Send Reports to Supervisors using reporting features that help customize the data how the supervisors need it.
Proper training for employees helps maintain order and introduce real value.

Watch our webinar that details shed light on investigations and the use of dashboards to improve incident management with in the organization

Incident Management and EHS Software

Companies are becoming technology-oriented to ensure they can track, organize, and mitigate any safety incidents that may arise. Moving away from paper-based systems, organizations are looking at tools that help prepare and address incidents without significant loss. To that end, one of the most important aspects of investing in a next-generation EHS system is the ability to collect data. Safety leaders can use embedded analytics, including charts, dashboards, and trend reports to derive insights that help identify and prevent incidents. Investing in good EHS software makes it easier to identify root causes, support them with relevant evidence, and document decisions with the help of a proven Root Cause Analysis (RCA) process. These EHS systems also help standardize workflow, track progress, and assign corrective and preventative actions.

ComplianceQuest Incident Management Software

Take preventive measures with a “system of collaboration,” helping various teams and key stakeholders collaborate and work together. Pursue positive reinforcement, wherein a successful safety action is appreciated and noted for future reference.

ComplianceQuest is a SaaS-based incident alert management system powered by Salesforce. The ComplianceQuest solution incorporates a user-friendly, intuitive portal wherein employees from any department and location can report an incident, near-miss, or observation. The solution offers instant visibility to the incident status and tracks alert and ticket status, thus ensuring all critical incidents are detected and managed by the teams concerned.

ComplianceQuest’s incident management features include the following –

OSHA Reporting & Compliance – Companies can report and track injuries and illnesses to ensure compliance with standards and regulations. The solution has pre-built electronic forms such as OSHA 300, 300A, and 301, making regulatory submission efficient
Near Miss reporting – The system collects all the data to report near-miss easily, thus ensuring a near miss never becomes an incident
Injury & Illness – Employees can easily track, manage, and report incidents from initial entry to completion
Environmental Hazards & Spills – Track environmental hazards and spills, and collect environmental data to remain compliant at all times
Real-time Reporting & Dashboards – Create dashboards using real-time data on individual and group workloads
Priority Alerting Across Platforms – Send messages in different formats: High and low-priority, via email, SMS, mobile push, and phone calls

How to Plan for Incidents and Near-misses with CQ Software?

ComplianceQuest offers next-generation AI-powered Quality and Safety Management Solutions with a safety management feature, Safety Essentials. Safety Essentials is a pre-configured software platform with best practices designed for companies needing an accelerated cloud-based safety management solution implementation. With access to real-time information and regulatory reports, organizations can run their safety programs efficiently, replacing paper processes and spreadsheets.

ComplianceQuest’s AI-powered Safety Essentials Solution includes tools such as incident management, audit management, risk assessment, safety inspections, behavior-based safety (BBS), training management, document management, and actions management functionality. Safety Essentials can be used to report observations, near misses, and incidents, conduct safety audits and inspections, perform investigations, and ensure effective implementation of CAPAs.