How to prevent accidents by getting your accident/incident management system right

• Stop accidents
• People find it easy to use on their own phones and computers
• Operatives gather complete information on the spot for all incidents and accidents
• Automatically and instantly channel serious incidents for appropriate management response
• Management gets a live picture of all risks faced by the business leading to suitable control measures for them all

These are some of the ultimate goals you likely have for your accident and incident management system. My mission is to equip directors responsible for health and safety with the kind of quality of information that directors of sales and marketing or finance have at their fingertips. To help you achieve these goals, think about 5 questions.

1. What are my company’s reporting process goals?

Think about what you would like to achieve with your reporting system? It might be some or all of the following:

• A system that works to capture and present the data you need to help you reduce injury and loss
• GDPR compliance to avoid prosecution or civil claims
• Capturing contemporaneous information within minutes of the incident including photographs and the names of witnesses to avoid key data loss
• A system that people find easy to use and that is on everyone's phone
• Metadata that helps identify spurious claims such as geocodes and time stamps
• Ways of categorising the seriousness of the incident and routing serious ones to appropriate management levels for fast action
• A confidential portal for storing follow-up information at various levels including line management and the health and safety team.
• Easy retrieval of all associated documentation without licences or logins.
• Automatic data production directly related to the KPIs of the organisation to avoid hours of data manipulation by the safety management team in preparation for board meetings or reports.

2. What difference will a good reporting system make?

You might be having repeated incidents simply because you don't have good information about them. A good system will help you control injury and loss. This will be good for morale.

Good reporting can increase efficiencies in operational processes. Processes that cause incidents waste time and money. Better visibility on where processes are going wrong will save you both these precious commodities.

If you are relying on paper-based systems you are creating a barrier to reporting. Organisations with paper-based systems get a fraction of incidents reported simply because of the inconvenience of finding the right form and handing it in to the right place. When it is handed in it has to be correctly routed. All of those stages in the process are points of failure.

The handling steps and lack of routing controls in a paper-based system may not be GDPR compliant.

Your digital system may not work well for or fit your flow. A generic or off the shelf digital system may give you even worse problems than a paper-based system. People may not have ready access to the system because of licencing issues and cost. This presents barriers to entry of data. Also, the system may not be tailored to your organisation and therefore may not provide you with appropriate levels of access for different levels of management.

You want senior management focusing on outputs, not data manipulation. If senior management are absorbed with Excel spreadsheets and spending time hunting data for putting into PowerPoint presentations for board reports, this is grossly inefficient. Some medium sized organisations have one or more persons simply managing the incident management data collection and presentation process, all of which can be automated.

A good reporting system will red alert incidents that management need to know about before the reporters or police arrive to ambush them.

3. What is hindering you now?

Is your current system working well? If not, what could be the barriers to change?

There can be some degree of corporate complacency or paralysis, perhaps because no disaster like a prosecution has occurred to bring the reporting system under sharp focus. Also, the organisational maturity might not have developed so that directors prefer not to be faced with bad news and would rather not know about incidents.

There might be cultural issues such as accidents often being reported after an employee returns to work, not at the time of the accident. This creates the risk of RIDDOR notifiable accidents being missed simply because they don’t get reported in time and hours data not being visible to the management team.

Is there a heavy reliance on manual exchange of information for accident reporting? Long delays on receiving and processing information and lack of transparency of information due to the process being paper and email based leading to huge inefficiency and frustration.

Is the data gathered and displayed in such a way that it can be learned from, e.g., to spot the trends in root causes of accidents/incidents?

4. What does your current reporting system cost you?

As a director for health and safety poor data is weakening your argument for budget and change and your status in the company.

A poor incident management system definitely costs an organisation a lot, but those costs may be hidden.

Myth – “Well, our system it is paper based, so it doesn’t cost anything”. What is the impact on your employees’ well-being and health as well as lost productivity?

Ongoing administration costs arise from data entry. If your current process involves manual data transference from emails and paper forms as the basis of creating endless spreadsheets and documents, how much time is spent on this?

Your current system may not safeguard against spurious accident claims. If contemporaneous photographs or other metadata is not part of the process, this can allow for abuse of the system.

With a poor system you are missing a wealth of learning opportunities from near-miss observations. There are possible higher insurance costs because you are not reducing accidents and there is a risk of prosecution from late RIDDOR notifications.

5. How will a digital system fit and integrate?

An off-the-shelf system that just fits right doesn’t exist. The right system for each company requires tailoring.??

Generic systems inevitably give generic outputs. Indiscriminate data will not give you the insights you need to reduce incidents.

Our systems are designed to fit and integrate with your needs. We start with your KPIs and known risks. Base your system around that. A good digital system will also integrate outputs from audits, checklists, and inspections to enable you to achieve your goals.

How to get the right accident and incident management system for you?

With decades of experience of corporate incident management system design, I deeply understand the issues you face and what you need proportionate to the size and risk level of your organisation.

I will be very interested to talk to you about your needs and wishes. I am happy to look at your current reports and help you think about what kind of reporting will be ideal. We can examine the flow of data within your organisation based upon its local and regional divisions and the flow of management responsibility. Let’s look at the tools your operatives currently have available and the way they interact with them.

McNeil Collective will assemble a configuration of our system for you, cost effectively using pre-coded parts and tools and also seamlessly coding specific aspects of the solution.

Do not hesitate to call or text me, Andrew McNeil on 07545 642 236 right now to begin getting your accident/incident management system right.