What is Safety Incident Management and Why Is It Important for Organizations?

Today, when industries are set up in every corner of the world, and everyone wants growth, work, and live a great life. We can see that workplace incidents and more accidents are occurring very often. Why so?

In 2022, North America itself reported around 2.6 million workplace hazards, accidents and illness. Again, why? What is the reason for such a huge number of accidents?

There are multiple reasons for this big problem of workplace accidents. Regardless, of how these incidents happen, whether it was an act of god or a matter of internal failure of the organisation. These workplace accidents are avoidable and can be avoided if proper steps are taken.

As an organisation, you need to understand the potential risks that come with different projects and make sure to be fully prepared if such incidents occur. But how can you as an organisation prepare for such incidents?

In this blog, we will discuss what is safety incident management, and its importance in organisations.

A safety incident management system is a process of identifying, reporting, tracking, correcting, mitigating, and analysing potential incidents across the workplace. It works as a hazard prevention tool for the organisation. Their work is to fix and clear such workplace issues, time before they become large, and cause a company-wide crisis.

What exactly pops into your mind, when you read the word “incident”? A fight in the middle of the road, a bus or truck crash, or someone committing a heinous crime? Yes?

However, an incident does not always mean the occurrence of such things. Think of a normal worker carrying on his work duties, which accidentally resulted in him getting an injury, illness, or damage to the organisation’s property. Now, this is what I mean when I say a work incident.

The word ‘incident’ has a broad meaning such as

1. An accident when someone gets injured.
2. An event that has the potential to harm employees.

Incidents also include near misses, which means when an accident almost happened, though it did not. ‘Almost accidents’ are a signal of your organisation’s failure in meeting its operation’s expectations.

The complete safety incident management process depends on four pillar components.

• Safety risk management
• Safety policy
• Safety promotion
• Safety assurance
• Safety Training and Awareness
• Safety Audits and Inspections
• Employee Participation
• Emergency Preparedness and Response
• Document Control and Record-Keeping
• Continuous Monitoring and Improvement

It is a matter of high importance to manage and avoid incident occurrences in an organisation. Managing incidents is important to keep your and your staff’s health and safety process in a good state. If you don’t have a safety incident management system in the organisation, then most hazards will likely go unreported by the staff. That means large-scale incidents might happen, and you wouldn’t have a strategy for how to deal with them if such small incidents are buried without being reported.

An efficient safety incident management helps in maintaining the health and safety of professionals working according to OSHA regulations. Some additional steps should and must be taken to ensure the

OSHA regulations and guidelines are honoured.

These may include:

• Staff training after an incident to emphasise what regulation was ignored or carried out inadequately.
• Have the proper wearing of ear protection when operating loud machinery.

Organisations do not take risk management seriously and often end up losing their importance and confidence in their employees, and staff. If your employees, or staff feel the organisation is not concerned about their safety. It will likely decline the morale of the organisation, thus resulting in reduced production levels. If the organisation makes efforts to improve their employees’ psychological safety, it results in high employee engagement levels and 3.4X productivity.

• Lower the operation costs of the organisation.
• Get a better work environment and reduce the risk of injuries.
• Reduce operational errors.
• Eliminate the additional costs.
• Apply better workforce safety laws in the organisation.
• Create a roadmap to safety concerns.
• Enhance awareness in organisation.
• Enhance the faith of employees towards the organisation.
• Boost the brand reputation.
• Eliminate any unnecessary cost including legal charges and claims.

To build a strong incident management system, you will need to follow several steps carefully. These steps will help you maintain your organisation a safe workplace, and prevent accidents from happening today, and in the future.

• Identify hazards: The first thing we always do is identify the problems we want and need to solve. Before taking any action, find the factors that caused the incident. Whether it was because of the wet factory floor, a loose electric wire, or excess weight on a platform. Find specific details about the cause.
• Report the incident with minute details: The next step is to file a report in which your employee who got injured in the incident recalls what equipment or tools were used. This report will also include incident details like when, where, and how the incident took place. Most importantly, find who was present when the incident happened.
• Investigate the whole incident: Record all the previous data and start a proper investigation of the accident, gathering even more information regarding how and why the incident occurred. Furthermore, the investigation should conclude with some suggestions on how the incident should be tackled if it occurs in the near future. You should circulate to your entire team, to inform them what measures should be implemented to ensure this incident doesn’t get repeated.
• Take action based on expert guidance & recommended suggestions: Once you find out the reasons behind the incident, take the appropriate actions to reduce such risk factors in the future. Here are some of the following strategies for doing so. 

Classify action action plan as:

1) elimination

2) Substitution

3) Engine Control

4) Admin Control

5) Personal protective equipment

• (a) Corrective actions: Take some correcting actions to remove the root of the problem that led to the occurrence of the same incident. For example- Let us say a fire took place because of an old, worn electric wire in the factory. In this case, a corrective measure or action would be to fix the wiring or replace it entirely to decrease the chance of another fire in the future.
• (b) Preventive actions: Identifies and mitigates potential hazards before an incident occurs (e.g., scheduled inspections to detect wiring issues early)
• (c) Regular Inspections: The best way to identify the most important preventative actions is by conducting regular inspections and encouraging every employee to report every accident.
• Analyse everything that happens: This step is an opportunity for every safety manager to analyse what factors caused the incident to happen. Moreover, list all the actions to prevent it from happening in the future such as: Staff training. Regular risk assessment. Robust hazard reporting.
• Analysis amongst employees: Note everything that happens in the organisation, review the incident trends, and make corrections whenever you find a leak to be more prepared against such incidents.
• Save the document findings: Note down the information you found before wrapping up the incident management process. A clear record of incident key summary showcases that you have properly understood the incident and why it happened and also the steps you should follow to make sure this never happens again.  
• Employee awareness of CAPA RCA: A proactive approach to effectively identifying, evaluating, and resolving issues, preventing recurrence, improving processes, and promoting sustainable growth within the organization is fostered by raising employee awareness of CAPA and RCA.
• ASSIGN RESPONSIBILITY TO Sustain the CAPA: By encouraging accountability, encouraging efficient follow-up, keeping an eye on actions, and establishing a continuous improvement culture within the company for long-term success, clearly defined roles guarantee the long-term implementation of CAPA.
• REGULAR FOLLWUP/AUDIT: Maintaining CAPA effectiveness, making sure corrective actions are carried out, spotting possible gaps, and promoting continuous improvement to satisfy organizational objectives and quality standards all depend on routine audits and follow-ups.

Here is a list of four steps that you should definitely take to` make sure your employees, and staff have a safe place to work in.

• Improve internal communication: You must have heard somewhere that communication is the key to every problem. Well, that is definitely one of the most righteous statements to date. If you want to improve how you deal with incidents, we suggest you make the workplace a happy place for employees where they can inform you about the incidents without any hesitation. This will help you alert your employees, informing them what happened.
• Invest time and money in advanced updated staff training: A lack of employee engagement or awareness around how to safely carry out operational tasks is what leads to more workplace accidents. The best way you can tackle a problem, or incident is by putting in valuable staff training. This will boost employee’s awareness and boost engagement levels.
• Conduct regular audits and inspections: By conducting audits and inspections regularly, you can get a deeper understanding of the top safety concerns that can impact your organisation and sharing these audits and information will help you in creating more visibility around the organisation’s most current health and safety priorities.
• Incorporate software to streamline the process: This is 2024 and using software will provide you with automating tools to control all safety incident processes. That will help your employees to easily report and document incidents whenever they occur, ensuring that none of them go unreported. This increases the trust in employees.