Why incident reports are important

Fast reporting on mobile incident apps allows for more accurate incident details, better investigations, and fast corrective actions. No employee should have to question whether or not their incident is worthy of an incident report. Every employee needs to be trained on the incident reporting process their company uses when they join the company. Employees should also be made familiar with the incident report form and a regularly held safety meeting is a great place to include refresher information on the incident reporting process.

At minimum, every company must provide a standard incident report form that every employee knows how to locate, complete, and submit.

The recommended method for reporting incidents is providing either employees or supervisors with an incident report app that allows them to fill out an incident report in the field. These reports will then be sent to the appropriate safety personnel to conduct an investigation.

The investigations and any follow up can then be handled by the appropriately trained party in your company. After any incident report is submitted it should be taken seriously. The employee who submitted the incident report should never be punished for doing so. Following the company incident report process, the employee who filled the incident report should be interviewed to ensure all facts have been collected and the incident is fully understood.

The incident report follow-up process should include an incident investigation, document medical care provided, corrective actions implemented, and preventative actions implemented for further incident prevention.

Every report should be saved in a secure location like the company's incident and investigation software. It's also not a bad idea to cover the hazard involved in your company's next safety meeting. Employers are required to notify OSHA when an employee is killed on the job or suffers a work related hospitalization. A fatality must be reported within 8 hours; hospitalizations, amputations, and eye loss must be reported within 24 hours. Incident and investigation software is one of the best ways to increase employee safety and decrease the chances of workplace fines and also decrease insurance costs!

The BasicSafe incident and investigation software improves reporting and investigation methods where possible and has been proven to lower the costs associated with workplace safety programs as well as the amount of time required to support them.

Have you witnessed unsafe working conditions in an area we don't regulate? If so, please contact WorkSafeBC. Incidents involving work or equipment regulated by the Safety Standards Act are reported in the State of Safety Report for the previous year. In addition, we investigate many of these incidents to gain an understanding of safety hazards in BC and what actions can be taken to manage those hazards.

Learn more about our incident investigations and see a complete listing. Open data on all incidents reported to Technical Safety BC is available on our website. We communicate this information to industry with the hope that similar incidents can be prevented.

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