Managing Accidents, Incidents and Near Misses
Recording and reviewing accidents, incidents and near misses is partly a legal requirement and partly the mechanism that stops the same thing happening again. In the UK, under the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 2013 (RIDDOR), some workplace events must be reported to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). Beyond that, any workplace that wants to learn from what goes wrong needs its own internal reporting process - and that process needs to work for the people using it, not just sit in a folder for auditors.
The approach that tends to work is a simple one. A named person is responsible for making sure accidents get logged. An accident report form (or accident book) is kept somewhere accessible. Near misses get captured on a different form so people do not have to describe harm that did not happen. And every logged incident gets reviewed to work out whether controls need updating.
Preventing Accidents and Incidents
The best way to deal with accidents is to stop them happening. Most of the preventative work is ordinary management activity that also appears elsewhere in the management system - risk assessments, PPE, signage, equipment maintenance, and regular inspection of the workplace. When accidents are investigated honestly and the findings feed back into these controls, the system improves over time.
Useful preventative measures include:
- Risk assessments covering each significant work activity, with the control measures actually implemented
- Personal protective equipment where risk cannot be controlled at source, issued to the right people and maintained
- Clear safety signage so hazards, required PPE and emergency arrangements are visible
- First aid provision proportionate to the workplace - trained first aiders, stocked kits, and known arrangements for getting help
- Routine inspections of work areas and equipment to catch hazards before they cause harm
- Planned maintenance of plant and equipment so that faults are dealt with before they become incidents
Reporting and Recording Accidents
When something does happen, the report should capture enough detail to be useful later. An accident report form, or an accident book, is normally used to record the basic facts - who was injured, what they were doing at the time, what happened, who witnessed it, and what injuries were sustained.
Logging accidents also builds a picture over time. If the same activity, location or piece of equipment keeps appearing in the reports, that is a signal that the controls there are not working. Organisations with more than a handful of people tend to keep a separate statistics record alongside the individual reports so trends can be spotted easily.
One practical point worth flagging: accident reports contain personal data about the injured person and are confidential. Printed accident books usually have perforated pages for this reason - completed entries are removed and filed with other confidential personnel records rather than left in the book for anyone to flick through.
Reporting Near Misses and Unsafe Conditions
Near misses are events that could have caused harm but did not. They are easier to learn from than accidents because nobody is hurt, there are no insurance implications, and the people involved are usually willing to be honest about what happened. The difficulty is that people often do not report them - partly because nothing "went wrong", partly because they do not want to make a fuss.
A separate near miss form, a visible encouragement to use it, and a manager who acts on what gets reported are usually enough to get a near miss process moving. Treating near misses as useful information rather than as failings is the important bit.
Reportable Injuries and Dangerous Occurrences under RIDDOR
In the UK, RIDDOR 2013 requires employers, the self-employed and people in control of premises to report certain workplace accidents, occupational diseases and dangerous occurrences to the HSE. Reports are made online through the HSE website or by phone to the Incident Contact Centre.
The categories that must be reported include:
- Work-related deaths
- Specified injuries including fractures (other than to fingers, thumbs and toes), amputations, any injury likely to cause permanent loss of or reduction in sight, crush injuries to the head or torso, serious burns, scalpings requiring hospital treatment, loss of consciousness from asphyxia, and injuries from working in enclosed spaces that lead to hypothermia, heat-induced illness, or require resuscitation or hospital admission
- Injuries to workers that result in more than seven consecutive days away from work or unable to do their normal duties (not counting the day of the accident)
- Injuries to non-workers taken directly from the scene to hospital for treatment
- Certain occupational diseases diagnosed by a doctor, including hand-arm vibration syndrome, occupational asthma, occupational dermatitis, occupational cancer and any disease attributed to biological agents
- Specified dangerous occurrences - incidents with the potential to cause serious harm, such as structural collapses, explosions or failures of lifting equipment
The duty to report sits with the "responsible person", which is the employer for employees, or the person in control of premises for non-employees. Reports of the most serious events (deaths and specified injuries) must be made without delay; others have set reporting windows.
Investigating Accidents and Incidents
Investigation is where the real value of accident reporting comes out. The aim is to understand what happened and why, not to find someone to blame. A proportionate investigation looks at the immediate cause (what physically went wrong), the underlying causes (what in the workplace allowed it to happen) and the root causes (what in the management system allowed those conditions to exist). The output is a set of actions that prevent recurrence - changes to equipment, procedures, training, supervision, or whatever else needs adjusting.
The reporting culture is where most organisations fall down. Workers see a near miss, shrug, carry on. Six months later it happens again - but this time someone gets hurt.
Make reporting easy, act on what people tell you, and feed the outcome back. You get a lot more useful information coming up the line.
One more thing worth knowing: over-seven-day injuries get missed under RIDDOR all the time because people think it is only about the big stuff. It is not. If someone cannot do their normal job for more than seven consecutive days after a workplace injury, it has to go to the HSE within 15 days.
We have the accident book in the office and the near miss forms on a clipboard in the workshop. Anyone can fill one in, nobody needs permission. Every month the SHEQ meeting goes through what has come in.
The one change that made the biggest difference was when we started actually telling people what happened after a near miss report went in - what we had changed, or why we had decided not to change anything. Before that, people felt like they were reporting into a black hole.
When auditing against ISO 45001, I look at the link between incident reports and the actions that follow. Clause 10.2 is clear: when an incident happens, the organisation has to react, deal with the consequences, investigate, evaluate the need for action, and implement whatever is needed to stop it happening again. A sample of accident reports with no evidence of follow-up is the quickest way to an ISO 45001 nonconformity I know. I will also cross-check a sample of records against sickness absence to see whether anything has slipped through.
Practical Compliance Guidance
Guidance on accidents, incidents and near misses is covered in Section 10 of the IMS1 Manual (Improvement), which sets out how the management system captures what has gone wrong and turns it into action. The same section deals with the reporting, investigation and corrective action process that the ISO standards require.
A range of alphaZ documents support the process - policies, report forms, statistics and guidance. They work together: the policy sets expectations, the forms capture the data, the statistics record tracks trends, and the guidance explains how investigation and reporting should be handled.
| alphaZ document | How to use it |
|---|---|
| ISO 9001, 14001 and 45001 IMS Toolkit | Full integrated management system toolkit containing all the documents listed below alongside the wider management system templates. |
| P-4 Accident and Incident Reporting Policy Procedure | Policy and procedure setting out the company approach to accident and incident reporting - who reports, what gets reported, and how. |
| GG-7-04 Accident and Incident Reporting Guidance | Plain-language guidance on the accident and incident process, suitable for issuing to managers and workers as reference material. |
| F-HS13 Accident Report Form | Form for recording accident details including injured person, witnesses, work activity at the time, injuries sustained and review of the cause. |
| F-HS6 Near Miss Reporting Form | Short form for logging near-miss events so they can be reviewed and fed back into the risk assessment and control process. |
| ER18 Accident Statistics | Register for tracking accident and incident numbers over time so that trends and patterns can be identified. |
| F-HS20 General Risk Assessment | General risk assessment template covering hazards, control measures and residual risk - the starting point for preventing accidents. |
| Toolbox Talk - Accident and Incident Reporting | Short training talk that can be delivered to workers to reinforce the importance of reporting and explain how the process works. |
Note - all the above files can be downloaded with an alphaZ subscription.
Frequently Asked Questions
UK Legislation
The following UK legislation is directly relevant to accidents, incidents and near misses. Organisations outside the UK should identify the equivalent legislation applicable in their jurisdiction.
- Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 2013
- Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974
- Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999
- Health and Safety (Offences) Act 2008
