When we talk about incident reporting, we often think about the ways that we can react after an incident has occurred at work. Whilst the initial response is important, there are also other elements that need to be considered, beyond just the immediate actions that need to be taken.
This article will look at the importance of incident reporting and having a system in place that can help your workplace be as safe as it can be.
Incident reporting helps you answer important questions
An incident reporting system not only allows you to keep on track of any incidents that occur, it helps you to prepare and track the near misses too.
An incident reporting system helps you answer questions around how safe your workplace is and how well prepared you are to deal with incidents, so that if anything did happen, you would know that you are doing the most you can to remain compliant and minimise risk.
Being able to track and trace your compliance is very important, as it allows you to cover yourself in the event of an incident. This is especially important in high risk industries such as construction, oil and gas, power plants, roads and buildings and hazardous sectors.
Incident Reporting is a requirement of any health and safety management system and when not carried out efficiently, the knock on effect may result in excessive costs to the business.
How does an incident reporting system help your business?
Above and beyond ensuring that you remain compliant, an incident reporting system ensures that you take a systematic approach to managing safety that is likely to minimise incidents in the first place. This will save you money, save you reputation damage, and keep your people safe.
Incident reporting systems enable you to maintain an attitude of continuous improvement – including the necessary organisational structures, accountabilities, policies and procedures to create a Continuous Improvement Cycle.
Incident reporting systems enable you to:
- Protect your employees
- Maintain a working environment that is safe
- Minimise risk
- Ensure that employees know how to report an incident
- Ensure employees take care of the health and safety of themselves and others.
- Help you identify trends and incident types
- Help you predict incidents and prevent them
- Helps your business remain compliant
- Conduct periodic reviews to assess risk
What are the key benefits of incident reporting?
A well designed incident management system has some key benefits. These include:
- Incident reporting systems prepare your business to deal with incidents
One of the key benefits of an incident reporting system is that it encourages employees to be prepared for an incident.
It also helps you understand how and why incidents occur and keeps the entire organization aware of their actions in real-time. The platform enables other employees to offer guidance or advice and lets critical stakeholders see the specific actions that were taken and how the incident was resolved.
- Increase communication within the organisation
Often, incidents occur because of bad communication within an organisation, however a reporting system helps to minimise this risk. The increased safety procedures for employees, clients, and contractors allow effective communication channels at all times.
With cloud-based technology, incident reporting systems can be accessed from any computer or mobile device with internet access, meaning that people can communicate in real-time in the event of an incident.
In an emergency situation, incident management software provides a timeline of communications so that senior managers can track the flow of communications and see whether the incident was escalated or resolved, and how. This gives you real-time situational awareness.
- Increased safety for employees, clients and contractors
With better incident reporting systems in place, you’ll be able to provide a safer environment for anyone you interact with.
Risks to all parties can be minimised and managed, meaning that your business should see less incidents and improved compliance.
How can incident reporting systems be implemented?
Implementing incident reporting systems needn’t be difficult. Beakon’s system can be configured to report, investigate, analyse and proactively action issues across all work disciplines with ease.
If you’d like to learn more about incident reporting systems and how they work, you can take advantage of our free trial to give it a go.
