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Sound familiar?
Worker is injured, RTW Coordinator doesn’t find out for almost a week.
Meanwhile, the worker is still off work, hasn’t heard from anyone, is
becoming less motivated and now the company may have a Lost Time Injury.
The horse has bolted – sound familiar?
This might have been avoided with a more effective incident reporting
process.
Get to work early!
There are so many benefits to getting your incident reporting and
response system right.
• Make sure all incidents are reported quickly – a simple effective
process will help with this
• Get to work early by responding to all incidents – a quick phone call
to the worker (and supervisor) goes a very long way
• Investigate all incidents - prevention is paramount; if you aren’t
aware of the cause then
removing or reducing the risk is more difficult.
• Involve Supervisors/Managers throughout the entire process – it is
their worker after all
• Set and manage expectations from all involved – effective
communication is a powerful tool
• Educate, educate, educate – make sure that everyone knows their
rights, roles and responsibilities
• Monitor, Measure, Improve, Reinforce – keeps the system working well
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Great message but how do we get it right?
A simple, accessible and user friendly system is the key. Whether
it is paper-based, call centre or online keep it simple. And most
importantly keep it personal. So, your worker has submitted an incident
form but has anyone responded to it?
Early action or should I say reaction, communication and follow up will
make the difference.
Sounds easy, right?
Let me go back to ‘accessible’ for a moment. I know; it’s obvious
to have a system that is accessible.
But in reality it’s not always that easy. In a previous role I was faced
with the prospect of overhauling the entire incident management process
for a very large company providing services around the clock. To make
matters worse >90% of the employees were on client sites with less than
6% having access to company email and intranet.
So how could I implement a process that would cater to everyone? The
only common denominator was that everyone had access to a telephone. So
I went for a 24/7 Incident Reporting Hotline. Not only was it
deceivingly cost effective it also had a profound impact on the Health
and Safety culture of the organisation.
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What Incident Reporting system should we use?
Make sure you implement the one that best suits your
organisation. This will take time and research if you are going to get
it right. Don’t just assume, do your homework. Employing an effective
project and change management approach will help you get there.
If you go paper-based make sure that it is user friendly and backed up
by good policies and procedures with simple templates and clear
guidelines. Most people don’t want to complete a long, wordy,
technically complex form – so keep it as simple as you can (where
possible).
If you choose an online system ensure that everyone has access and
training or at the very least, access to clear instructions on how to
submit an incident report.
Or if it’s a call centre approach, again, it needs to be user friendly.
Having a process that takes 30 minutes to extract the information from
the caller after being on hold for 20 minutes is just not workable. A
call lasting less than four minutes is your ultimate aim.
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How can we make the system successful?
Communicate, Educate, Reinforce.
The importance of regularly reinforcing incident reporting cannot be
overstated. If you take the eye off the ball, they will take their eye
off the ball. Not because they don’t care, in business everyone has
countless competing priorities so you have to keep it in their faces (so
to speak).
And everyone involved in the claims or injury management function can
educate. As a claims manager every time you notice late reporting pick
up the phone and encourage that employer to focus on early reporting.
Reinforce the benefits. And if they don’t know how, guide them to the
help that is out there.
At the risk of sounding repetitive – simplicity is the key.
Avoid this trap!
Ask someone to review the documents; having a layperson provide
feedback is invaluable. After all they are the ones that need to use the
system. And if you are in an industry that dictates a level of technical
complexity try to find a way to do this without the process becoming too
onerous.
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Why does it matter?
Not all incidents involve lost time or treatment or become claims
however if left unchecked they can and do escalate.
An effective, consistent process for reporting and responding to
incidents has many benefits;
• Provides early intervention, medical advice and support
• Demonstrates management commitment
• Reduces lost time duration and claim numbers
• Improves return to work outcomes
• Provides a productive and supportive workplace
• Builds staff confidence and morale
• Contains the cost of incapacity and resultant premium
• Reduces the indirect costs (loss of productivity, recruitment and
training)
• Increases understanding of organisation risk
(via incident
investigations and statistical reporting)
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Let’s finish on that last point.
Getting your workers to report is only one step in the process. But when
we talk about incident response this is twofold. Ensuring that all
incidents are investigated is so important.
Regardless of which method your company uses to undertake the
investigations make sure that the information is collected, shared and
stored appropriately. This could be online (via a database) or hard copy
with the H&S Manager or even on the claims file kept with the internal
workers compensation team. However always being mindful of privacy and
other relevant legislation.
Clear linkages between incident reporting/response and
investigation/outcomes is invaluable from a prevention, risk management,
liability and claims management perspective
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